by Jayant Parmar
The Portrait
I can clearly count his ribs.
Sweeping the streets
His spine has worn out.
His dreams have been buried in the waste paper heap.
He remained all his life half naked
In fact he was intentionally kept so,
And yet no one called him half naked man.
So many holes of atrocities
On his shirt of life
While alive, how many deaths he met with,
If I begin to count
How many births I need to take?
Till the day
He has been kicked,
Tolerated tyranny
Silently.
But today from his sweat
I smell
Dynamite!
Jayant Parmar is a bilingual poet writing in Urdu and Gujrati. He received the Sahitya Akademi award in 2009. He is also a calligrapher and an artist. 'The portrait' was translated by Vankar G K.