GENOCIDE

NOTE: This poem is dedicated to all the persecuted communities of the world.

I say to all those leaders,

Do not look the other way,

Do not hesitate,

It is within your power to avoid a genocide of humanity,

For the dead and the living, we must bear witness,

My people are few,

They resemble the scattering trees of a storm-swept plain,

The first time it was reported that our Kashmiri pandits friends were being butchered,

There was a cry of horror, 

Then hundreds were butchered,

When many were butchered, there was no end to the butchery,

A blanket of silence spread.

When evil-doing comes like falling rain nobody calls out "stop!"

When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible,

When sufferings become unendurable the cries are no longer heard,

The cries, too, fall like rain in summer.

I once spoke to someone who had survived the genocide in Nadimarg,

She said to me that there was now nobody left on the face of the earth,

Either friend or relative, 

Who knew who she was,

No one who remembered her girlhood, her early mischief and family lore,

No sibling or boon companion who could tease her about that first romance,

No lover or pal with whom to reminisce,

All her birthdays, exam results, illnesses, friendships, kinships—gone,

She went on living,

But with a tabula rasa as her diary and calendar and notebook,

I think of this every time,

I hear of the callow ambition to 'make a new start' or to be 'born again': Do those who talk this way truly wish for the slate to be wiped?

Genocide means not just mass killing, to the level of extermination,

A mass obliteration to the verge of extinction,

You wish to have one more reflection on what it is to have been made the object of a 'clean' sweep?

If I look at the mass I will never act,

It is not power that corrupts but fear.

Civil Wars happen when the victimized are armed,

Genocide happens when they are not,

I did not know then how much was ended,

I look back now from this high valley of my old age,

I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young,

I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud,

A people's dream died there,

It was a beautiful dream.

Religion makes people kill each other, 

Science supplies them with weapons,

Genocide, after all, is an exercise in community building,

They want us to be afraid,

They want us to be afraid of leaving our homes,

They want us to barricade our doors

and hide our children,

Their aim is to make us fear life itself!

They want us to hate,

They want us to hate the other,

They want us to practice aggression

and perfect antagonism,

Their aim is to divide us all!

They want us to be inhuman.

They want us to throw out our kindness,

They want us to bury our love

and burn our hope,

Their aim is to take all our light!

They think their bricked walls

will separate us,

They think their damned bombs

will defeat us,

They are so ignorant they don't understand,

My soul and your soul are old friends,

They are so ignorant they don't understand,

When they cut you I bleed,

They are so ignorant they don't understand,

We will never be afraid,

We will never hate,

We will never be silent for life is ours!

It is not what you can do for your country,

But what you can do for all of mankind,

The ultimate logic of racism is genocide,

If human is capable of conducting genocide,

No need for an asteroid to wipe out dinosaurs,

Genocide is the responsibility of the entire world,

Let's stand against the killing of innocent civilians,

It is time to make the future better than today,

Together we can bring peace and unity to our communities.