Never saw a sapling in the place where it stands today
Nor recall ever having dropped a seed astray
And yet it stands tall above all with a dignified presence
Reaffirming its place and space for its moved existence
Alluring but forlorn is the tale of lost generations
Enduring roots, dreams and hopes, pared by colonial ablations

Was it from Bahamas, Bermuda or any other distant humble land?
Yoked to unknown destiny, arrived in droves a godforsaken band
Bartered for nothing but toil and toil for so many eons to come
Rendered rootless, drifting and yearning and striving to grow in a newfound bigoted odium
For the lofty trees of this land resolve that roving shrubs are throwaway weeds with no place in their hallowed civilization
Cast off by the land they rear with endless grinds, no patch to moor and rise and bourgeon, entombed in a stunted gestation

Now long-lost over numerous pedigrees, myriad folklores of the native soil
How mothers forgot the cradlesongs that nursed the soul of a revered race now utterly in recoil
What lingers now is a haunting solitude in a quagmire that snaps the self from two ends of time to an empty dot
In a fleeting perilous present, a severed clan loses its face, voice and being to become a trivial allusion in the history’s grander plot
With passing spells of inertia, as subdual and prejudice give way to upheavals amidst the rootless souls
A downcast tribe awakens to assert its solemn patch bathed many times over with the crimson tolls

A changed regime with so called “liberals” chanced upon these historyless cynical souls as prized finds
“A quarter million ballots gotten, if only they could grow on our land” – what a politics of impotent minds.
Well, lastly married to a land eons away from nativity
Once shrubs now deep rooted trees bourgeoning on the same patch that sought its price with their diminished identity
But uprooted to the core with their unconvinced existence after ages of throbbing tribulation
For the history of a race is scarred forever when banished like an uprooted tree and reduced to a faint aberration

© 2015 Vikas Chandra