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Poem: A GURKHA MOTHER (Satis Shroff, Freiburg)
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Rating: 15 user(s) have rated this article
Posted by: Santosh,
on 1/11/2008,
in category "Poems"
Views: this article has been read 1662 times
Location: Germany
A GURKHA MOTHER (Satis Shroff)
(Death of a Precious Jewel)
The gurkha with a khukri
But no enemy
Works for the British Gurkhas
And yet gets shot at
In missions he doesn’t comprehend.
Order is hukum,
Hukum is life
Johnny Gurkha still dies under foreign skies.
He never asks why
Politics isn’t his style
He’s fought against all and sundry:
Turks, Tibetans, Italians and Indians
Germans, Japanese, Chinese
Argentinians and Vietnamese.
Indonesians and Iraqis.
Loyalty to the utmost
Never fearing a loss.
The loss of a mother’s son
From the mountains of Nepal.
Her grandpa died in Burma
For the glory of the British.
Her husband in Mesopotemia
She knows not against whom
No one did tell her.
Her brother fell in France,
Against the Teutonic hordes.
She prays to Shiva of the Snows for peace
And her son’s safety.
Her joy and her hope
Farming on a terraced slope.
A son who helped wipe her tears
And ease the pain in her mother’s heart.
A frugal mother who lives by the seasons
And peers down to the valleys
Year in and year out
In expectation of her soldier son.
A smart Gurkha is underway
Heard from across the hill with a shout
‘It’s an officer from his battalion.
A letter with a seal and a poker-face
“Your son died on duty,” he says,
“Keeping peace for Her Majesty
The Queen of England.”
A world crumbles down
The Nepalese mother cannot utter a word
Gone is her son,
Her precious jewel.
Her only insurance and sunshine
In the craggy hills of Nepal.
And with him her dreams
A spartan life that kills.
Glossary:
gurkha: soldier from Nepal
khukri: curved knife used in hand-to-hand combat
hukum: Befehl/command/order
shiva: a god in Hinduism
Satis Shroff
Satis Shroff decribes himself as a mediator between western and eastern cultures, and sees his future as a writer and poet. He lives according to the motto: once a writer, always a writer, and has written, what the Germans would call a 'Landesumschau' for his readers, with impressions from Freiburg, Venice, Rottweil, Prague, Paris, London, Frankfurt, Basle and Grindelwald.
Satis Shroff has also written political poetry, about the war in Nepal, the sad fate of the Nepalese people, the emergence of neo-fascism in Germany.His anthology of poems has been published by www.Lulu.com:'Katmandu, Katmandu.'His bicultural perspective makes his poems rich, full of awe, and at the same time heartbreakingly sad. He carries the fate of his people to readers in the West, and his task of writing is a very important one. His true gift is to invent Nepalese metaphors and make them accessible to the West through his poetry. His prose with the title 'Through Nepalese Eyes' has also been published by Lulu.com.
Satis Shroff was awarded the German Academic Prize.He has studied Zoology & Botany in Kathmandu and Medicine & Sozialarbeit in Freiburg & Creative Writing in Freiburg under Prof. Bruce Dobler (MFA Assoc. Prof. Univ. of Iowa) & Writers Bureau Manchester). He is a lecturer in Basle (Switzerland).
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