THE SCREAM

A splinter of the sky
From amidst the office files

When dusted
And polished
Rose thunder and lightning
Hidden
In the blue expanse of the wandering clouds

Below
Surged the sea
Of unfathomed depths
Unending waves
Mysterious whirls
And undercurrents

From it
Surfaced a ship
One that sailed
Before Christ
From Musiris or Mesopotamia
Thronging with lunatics
Caught from the streets
Flogged, branded
And hunted down

From it
Disembarked a scream
Escaping
The jaws of storms and whales
Crossing
The Black Sea, the Red Sea
The Pacific and the not-so-Pacific oceans,

And spread as silence
Far away
In the Dark Continent

A silence towering
As hills, valleys
And boulders.

© Thachom Poyil Rajeevan

Commentary:

This poems attempts an analysis of the pathological structure of the third-world power structure, which feeds upon primal and natural wrath and energy of people. The medieval pathological methods adopted by the then power structure are still used by the ruling class to contain or tame the natural or political anger in youths in third-world countries. This is carried out by subjugating them to all kinds of official roundabouts, which remind us of the medieval asylum treatments. In the poem a piece of paper got from the office files becomes a sky. And it turns into many other real-life oriented, and historically rooted experiences, finally leading the reader onto the final phase of cries spreading over the yet un-discovered continents of darkness and despair. The scream associates the historical and pathological with the contemporary.