Tiredness

A historical poem

I am tired,

I am tired like a French dragoon giving his last charge at Waterloo;

I am tired like an Italian gunner’s last push to move

An artillery piece up the mountains of Isonzo;

I am tired like a Jewish girl’s struggles for her last gasp of air

at the gas chamber of Auschwitz;

Like the emaciated hands of a Bengal-destitute

Begging for a bowl of Desi congee during the famine of ‘43;

I am tired like the final steps of an Armenian woman

Hounded by the Ottomans;

Like a Native American on the Trail of Tears —

Becoming foreign in her own land;

As the slave in the South just offloaded from the ship from Africa was;

I am tried like the hopes and dismay

Of the perpetual Parisian revolutionaries;

Like a priest of the Cathedral of Reims

The morning after its shelling by the Wehrmacht;

As a Russian peasant who was alive in the first half of the 20th century was;

I am tired like Siraj-ud-Daulah at Plassey

After the treachery of his kith and kin;

Like the bricks and steel beams of the air-raid shelters

During the blitz of London or the bombing of Dresden;

As a companion of the communist ideologue, Che Guevara, was,

In the mountainous forests of the Andes;

I am tired like the hungry and sick at a Japanese POW camp;

Like South Asia was in ‘47 after a swarm of riots stung up her whole figure;

As the heavy breathing of a buffalo pulling a cart-full of logs

Along a muddy rural road is;

I am tired like the battered structures of Stalingrad, like the tanks at Kursk, the machineguns at Somme, The vessels at Midway;

Like a hussar on the plain of Borodino, the partisans under Tito,

As the Napalm-burnt villages of Indochina was;

I am tired like the refugees from Baghdad or Damascus

Trying to cross the Mediterranean

On a rubber boat under the thumbs of traffickers, hungry and thirsty;

Like the Bamyan Buddhas were of Afghan warlords;

As an industrious escort or a cabby is at the end of their long and busy day;

I’m tired; I’m tired,

Tired…

Of carrying this enormous baggage of lungs, intestines, neurones,

Bones, veins, and glands;

In short, I’m tired like J. Alfred Prufrock was.