Lava

You feel caught up in this power politics
of conscienceless ruling elites—mere puppet, helpless, hapless,
without any power to do anything significant
solid to alter the given
histories, a mere shadow, on the margins,
a cipher…then erupts the
suppressed rage, and
words become a molten lava
that burns down everything
its long and tortuous path;

silence gets punctured
suddenly
solitude, overwhelmed by noise;
noise then
becomes rumbling sound—
the voice of the awakened
mass, long hypnotized
by poll rhetoric, new threats and fears,
spun narratives, now comes out of deep
slumber, alert and mindful of the dark.

Then:
castles
empires
tumble down, very swiftly
by the raging, roaring voice,

entire solid system
topples down
—disentangled finally from the doctored
versions of realities, a web of lies, half-truths
and false promises.

You, at that precise moment, become
Part of the sweeping change!

Sunil Sharma is Toronto-based senior academic, critic, literary editor and author with 23 published books: Seven collections of poetry; four of short fiction; one novel; a critical study of the novel, and, nine joint anthologies on prose, poetry and criticism, and, one joint poetry collection. He is a recipient of the UK-based Destiny Poets’ inaugural Poet of the Year award---2012. His poems were published in the prestigious UN project: Happiness: The Delight-Tree: An Anthology of Contemporary International Poetry, in the year 2015. Sunil edits the English section of the monthly bilingual journal Setu published from Pittsburgh, USA. For more details, please visit here Read other articles by Sunil, or visit Sunil's website.