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Wake! Asia! Wake! (Part Two)

Part Two

Older in age
younger in growth

still heeding His Master's Voice

the Great swirling dark illiterate masses

led by less than nought point nought nought nought nought nought nought nought to the power of 32

who prefer nukes for toys
at the cost of common everyday joys

These that hanker after the departed master's pat on the back

for the Man-Booker
for the National Book Award
for the Fullbright
for the Visiting Professorship and/or IIAS Fellowship
for the Ivy League-Oxbridge doctoral degree
for in short the Master's pedigree-conferring embrace

These who do not know
do not want to know
do not wish to know
will not know
if there's a difference

between a Genji Monogatari or the Monkey
between a Sakuntala or the Gitanjali
between a poem and a public parade

These that will churn tons of postcolonial muck
And oblige their students to gorge every bit with spit
Just to stamp careers with their brainprints

These that will turn their coat
turn their tongue
turn their souls
for a Nobel

These that preen strut pout pose pretend
mouth ready to swill the millesium

this bouquet mind you titillates the left corner of the upper palate
like a petal unfolding in spring from a hymen

the dark obedient swirling masses lie dumb night after never-ending
night
to ebola and dingue and chikungunya swill water
shrivelling their cramped contorted viscera

Nothing of the foisoning ageold homegrownwine
strained through Ol' Kayyam's ever draining ruba'iyat bowl
keeps vigil in their scelerosed veins

I will slap this officious reason
In the face with wine in hand

Who so bold to slap sense into the buttressed elus
But those drunk with common insolence sense

Darius the First built a confining wall
around the Greco-Roman Empire's eastern front
a first wall of self-will
Gengiz Khan tore it down with his sabersharp teeth
after climbing deftly through the David Copperfield hole
in the Great Wall

See how Mao stemmed the tide with his Long March
Only to wall in his Zhong Guo
An Asia within an Asia
The Central Asian Crown
to be propped up again either by vassal states
or by tribute offering nations in return for health-giving largesse

while tough little Viets struggled without wailing on bare feet
to sling the Twentieth Century's Goldorak down to an ignominious fall

while those that weep after twenty lost centuries at their Wailing Wall
wall their brethren in a closely policed jail
wailing at every television reprisal performance
their insecure un-Godly fate in the dead sea of faiths
at the bare hands of suicidal wall breakers
hemmed in around their waists

like those fencesitters
the Greater East Asia Prosperity builders
who
let MacArthur gird them behind an Ocean Wall
silent superior-thinking men and women
unable to wish their neighbours bonjour
even after the unhealed unhealing wounds inflicted
by brave kamikaze samurais
walled in behind obsequious bending backs
and mechanical smiling faces

What brews in quiet
what festers in stealth
Asia's white master race
a Botha-deemed non-apartheid equal

ONE of the seven rulers of this world

While those that lay claim, nay, boast of
to the largest democratic state
a bi-cameral constitution
simply inherited from Westminister
as much as the unifying language
and the soi-disant socialist stamp
transported lock stock and tablier
from a Cambridge freemasonic lodge
by the Nehru dynasty progenitor
look the other way
with thumb and index closing on nostrils
when their pariah cart their faeces away
and still after millennia acknowledge and uphold the Brahmin
the self-proclaimed superior priesthood caste
those who speak for the Godhead Brahman
albeit speak with Him in the only sacred Sanskrit tongue
thus to be enthroned
on the highest pure-blooded pedestal

Can there be an Asia
the cradle of quarrelling Gods
which can listen to the little voice within
the voice of innocence

Is there an ASIA
or
are there asias

As there were warring Euro-nations…

[ to be continued ]

poem by T. Wignesan
Added by Poetry Lover
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