THE PREY

In the burning street
Burning house
Burning room
I flare open
The burning door

On the burning cot
I lie down
Burning

The night burned out
But not the cot
Nor the door
The room
The house
Or the street

Lying on earth
I alone
Burn.

© Thachom Poyil Rajeevan

Commentary:

The poem is about the unrealistic social understanding of the suicidal revolutionaries, who conceive the world as the replica of their own paranoia. The society, they think, is ripe for a revolution. The final denouement bestows them with dejection. But by that time their life would be of no significance, because the next generation might have taken over the control of affairs — a perennial paradox of the third-world revolutions.