You who spelt the sick
World’s death sentence
You threw all the doors
Open with your venom
Licking the poison with
Your tongue and biting
Its heart with your teeth
Your season in hell was
Harsher than Rimbaud’s
It wasn’t your hell alone
But also the hell of your
People who like bursting
Sores dwelt in your body
You allowed those sores
To infiltrate your poems
Where unloosed panthers
Rent the quarantined air
And what irony, Namdeo,
The government worries
Of thread worms in water
While you sit on the moss
Wondering when foul gods
Will disappear from earth
Writing on wall reads: “Panee gaalaa, naaroo taalaa" (Filter water to avoid Naaroo). ‘Naaroo’ is a disease caused by thread worm infection that was prevalent in the 1960s and 1970s.
(Manash is a poet whose first collection, Ghalib's Tomb and Other Poems, was published in November 2013 by The London Magazine.)
