Under the mango tree

Under the mango tree

A lone mango tree stands
remembering a village old
Brown legs, frayed pockets , shining marbles
Beedi smoke of old men
Anklet chimes ,girlish chatter and
motherly concerns sweetening the breeze.
Life moved with the ease of time
dropping enough green mangoes
for pickles and little girls to eat with salt
savouring every drop, sweet and sour.

Somewhere in this bountiful land
adorned with nature’s green crown
Mothers turned into  Kaikeyis
neglecting little  Rams
hoping to transmogrify into modern queens
School masters shortened the lessons
omitting the moral part of stories
Soon the reek of distorted knowledge spread far
– to grab, to hoard for one’s gain.

There started the sickening saga
Childhood fast forwarded into youth,
into men selling daughters
Neither innocence nor  old age tremors
could deter them
Money was declared the leader
however soiled with gory sins
Entrepreneurs shed the last moral feathers
donning avaricious masks
Bulldozing honesty ,
trampling  over life with mafia boots
Reducing human values,
raising quotation stakes
God men with I-pods in armpits
hooked confused souls with immoral nets.

Bigger are the houses,yet hearts shrunk into  hard pebbles
Locks  galore often with lost keys
Paddy fields drowned under teak wood mansions
Muddy village ways ,now pot-holed death traps
The sprawling village horizontally  compressed into
oxygen depleted  sky-scrapers
The barren mango tree has sheds its last leaves
on forgotten graves rotting among its brethren roots.

©Reena Prasad PUBLISHED IN WORDS ON THE WINDS OF CHANGE( Brian Wrixon) Anthology.