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Please share the text of Zulfikar Ghose’s poem “The Loss of India”

Please share the text of Zulfikar Ghose’s poem “The Loss of India”
The Loss of IndiaZulfikar Ghose

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    1. Lucifer

      Lucifer

      • better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven
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      better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven

      Eagles cartwheeled above illuminations
      Of Independence Day, the dogs sniffed at
      The electric bulbs which sizzled like fat
      The tall grass the monsoons left on the mountains
      Was aflame like corn in the setting August sun
      Two stones collided, sparked. India began to burn.

      At Mahatma Gandhi’ s prayer meeting,
      Under Ashoka’s wheel on the tricolour,
      The air intoning religious verses,
      A man stood in the scabbard of the crowd,
      A machine gun at the tip of his zealous tongue.
      What well-tutored doves the politicians
      Had released into the skies above Delhi
      Had already blackened with the soot
      Of communal hatred. The air chanted
      The Bhagvat Gita, the Koran and the Bible .
      Gandhi nodded, warmed by his goat’s-milk diet,
      A moses and a Mohammed thinned
      To the bones of a self-denying innocence,
      Mild as foam on the tutored crest of his
      People’s violence, straight as a walking stick
      On the savage contours of his country
      When the bullets hit him, his body was cut
      Into the bars of jail he had never left,
      His stomach shrivelled in another hunger fast.

      A boy in the streets, sulking in his boots,
      Kicked at stones and poured his lip at crows.
      There was the shade to retreat to, the doors
      To be behind. But the pride of mountains
      Annoyed him, the neighing peaks loud
      With thunder exhaling the smoke of monsoon clouds.
      His nostrils twitched like a cow’s when a fly
      Sits there. For the sea air of Bombay was
      Salt, dry. And how could he describe his loss?
      His desperately calm the landscapes were!
      His heart, become a stone in the catapult
      Of his mind, could have struck the foolish adult
      Passions where murder and faith excluded each
      Other. Through eagles still hung like electric fans
      In the sky and the rocks suggested permanence,
      The blood in the earth was not poultry-yard slaughter.
      The boy cushioned his heart in the moss
      Of withdrawal for his India and his youth was lost.

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