To the Shunned One

As dawn rises to spread your light, blessings over one and all, we your children descend in cages into long tunnels of darkness. Our day is night, lit with the flashlight from comrades, like stars enkindling comradeship, little drops of grace in hell of death knells. Darkness never goes, but stays along the staleness of the night before; borne in breath, wear and smelly air of coal corridors.

Nostalgia for us is old, with diggers of gold we are the miners fueling the lust for fuel for the greedy ones who grow by tricks and profits propagating philosophies terminating biology callus of the diminishing biosphere.

Dark patches on our lung -blacklung, and bloody saliva spits from our tongue, our children learn in dust filled misery, inherited destiny. Born of mate in shanties of hate from women we beat each night, before we fornicate. This vine is no Clementine. Strip the fantasy and you will see, the miner in boot turned to brute swallowed in the tradition of subjugation and subaltern deprivation.

Three generations ago our living lands they stole, to create holes for growth of some and tinker sums. When all is gone they talk of change meaning Climate Change, through promises, programmes, codes called ‘partners for change’.

From deep pits, crevices in our mind we see you our dear One, shun by powers who wrapped in luxury and fantasy of marketing technology wrap you too away from reality. Might that can hide sunlight must be right.

They call us native in same lingo they talk of you as the alternative. Your wind your heat your light your waves are still theirs as possibilities not necessities, for greed not need of practice for social justice. What’s civil ‘ant evil if it’s profitable. That’s the possibility they mean when today they talk of Corporate Responsibility.

You voiceless One, like me whose thought and voice is ignored, you Great One, you Only One you giver of all we have and are, hear us at this hour join me and me and me us little stars, miners afar for possibility of sanity and biodiversity.

Xavier Dias

April 14, 2002

Jharkhand