Waiting for the War to End

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WAITING FOR THE WAR TO END
I see the black smoke of bodies
charred and burning up my dreams, the red tears
of my dismembered country –
Nepal, you used to be a canvas, green and radiant,
now painted darkly with the brush of human despair
and the sticky patina of blood, hope
disemboweled by rusty khukuris and AK-47s
and old helicopters given for free by friendly countries
wanting only security, but do they see –
do they see the dead bodies? We have
become a nation where the mountains and the fields
and especially the rivers are flooded, flooded, flooded –
over and over with the sacrifice of human corpses -
and once again the soul is at large, like modernity
torn forever, mixed with too much hate and ideology
once again we come back to this time and place
back to this impasse, back to this place of power
where the struggle is less for the future than it is
for the bloody now, so here we are, all of us,
here and now and breathing still, waiting for the war to end





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