War-Whores, War-Heroes

The tectonic rage, came without mercy, and took
away two flowers of your soul. How could you
cry for the pain, that spans millions of dark-years?
How could you measure the universe of loss?
Once you buried your angels, you realized
you got to live with your own ghosts
for the rest of your life. The next day, you took

a deep breath and decided to move on.
You needed to build a house,
from the timber and timbre of your
own salts. Making dreams out of elegies,
crafting structures from the entropy
of heart-wrenching irreversibles. You went

to a far-off land to make enough gold
for your precious remains. On 6/20/2016,
on your way to work, you were murdered by
the war-whores of the west,
in the name of complex equation, that keeps
pissing the lies of democracy, justice and peace,
greed and oil remaining the constant invisibles.

And you were the only war-hero of the
entire story. The war of life.

Author’s Note: This poem is for Mr. Madhusudhan Koirala and 13 other Nepalese who were killed in a suicide bombing attack in Kabul, Afghanistan on June 20, 2016. All were working as security guards in Afghanistan. Just a year before, Mr. Koirala lost his two children in the large earthquake that rattled Nepal.

Sudeep Adhikari, from Kathmandu Nepal, is professionally a PhD in Structural-Engineering, and a compulsive reader/writer. He lives in Kathmandu with his wife and family and works as an Engineering-Consultant. His works have found their place in many online/print literary journals, based in United States, Canada, England, Wales, India and Japan. Read other articles by Sudeep.