Kamikaze

Edmund spends his lonely hours
each evening: the news channel
plays relentlessly in the kitchen,
in a steel framed TV, next to a
pot of white lilies;
they bring foreign stories every hour
appealing enough to fly him back
to the rubbles of Basra as he
detests cooking yet another year,
yet another day, in his vacant life
to feed his resolute stomach, even on
diseased afternoons when antibiotic gas
burps out of his throat, defeats
his mind to sleep.

Some times he sits on bamboo floor,
on a cream cushion and stares
at the brick-floored gullies of his life:
rusty, pariah and deaf; and before
sinking into an engulfing emptiness,
he begins to hope that one day,
kamikaze, the divine wind sent by
Sun Goddess will blow his way,
and fill his futile life with visitors.

But it needs no introspection that
kamikaze never came for the Japanese
young men in their teens and twenties
who left their families and rallied
for war, only to return
to a suspended hollowness, and
uranium burnt bodies.

Kamikaze never comes,
except for some soldiers in USA military:
they win every war, even when
they explode babies and grandmothers,
whilst their tanks play songs, inspire them,
“kill the motherf**, kill…!”

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Sumeet Grover

Sumeet Grover is the founder of Global Poetry, dedicated to creativity, human dignity, dialogue and global citizenship. He is a winner of the Portico Brotherton Open Poetry Prize 2014 and was shortlisted for the Jane Martin Poetry Prize in 2014 & 2015. He has authored three books of poetry: Signals (2017), House Arrest & Disobedience (2015) and Change (2011). Grover is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development and Environment.

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