Silent Sleep The Dead

Though the sun had begun bleeding in the West With an explorer's gait, I walked jumping over gutters My track, flanked with knee high grass and nettles Also wild bushes of all kinds that grew in clusters I saw dragonflies whirring around in circles Their wings catching glints of the evening light As they buzzed from one blade of grass to the other Giving a solitary soul benign company and sure delight Strange enough, my track ended in an open space Enclosed by cracked walls, now a forlorn territory There are raised mounds, overgrown with weeds I can easily make out, it is an ancient cemetery In these ancient graves sleep the silent dead Their toil and trouble ended with life They must have been perhaps heroes of the land No more are they part of world's victory or strife Nor its sad commemorations or triumphant jubilees Though released from the shackles of oppression Each dear presence has now become an absence Here they lie anonymous, without a single possession Some graves are marked by crosses and headstones But most of them are nameless, worn out by time We do not know how or when came their end Did they die in old age or die in their prime Or perish in a battle or struck by some pestilence However their names are blotted out from life's tome They have become inseparably one with the elements And they lie here motionless exuding a strange calm Generations pass and their progeny comes Unmindful of who lived before them Neither thankful of the legacy left behind Nor thinking, all the comforts, from their toil stem Oh Death! You are the mighty leveler of lives With your indiscriminate hands when you strike All differences are ironed out, all distinctions erased Devoid of any rank, here sleep the king and the slave alik