Highway Murder

 

Listen you all, men and nature!

They are killing me!

As the iron hisses and kisses

the rings of my age,

I stand benumbed in daze,

This end was not supposed to come so soon,

Wasn’t I fulfilling all the duties assigned to me,

entitling me another wintery full moon?

 

In self-imposed anesthesia

I just feel the saw’s butchering

in the bloodless flesh in my guts,

There is no blood in me

to give the evidence of a murder,

The sanguine darkness of my mass

is worth only stone for you.

 

On this hazily sun-lit winter noon,

The hounds are around me,

My murder has been sanctioned

by the state authorities!

For decades I stood for both nature and man,

During those beautiful days

this road was a simple friend

leading to common journeys and destinations,

Now it becomes a foe and highway

leading to some illustrious ray,

And I become redundant old,

standing in the way of progress

with my few square-feet of foot-hold.

 

If a healthy mass like me is no life;

no more than a mile-stone,

I hope to tell my murder story

till the axes, scythes and saws

send my tiniest of branches to be turned to ashes.

 

We trees never wince with pain

as your axes spray around chips of our flesh,

I understand we had equal rights

till mankind was just part of the nature,      

Now this saw going deeper and deeper

into my bloodless guts,

reminds me of our inevitable fate,--

Every tree on earth now has a deadly date

with the greedy most, treacherous and unforgiving mate.   

 

They know that I’m massive and big,

So they are afraid of my fall,

Haa! The cowards!

They don’t know, while they rob me

of my few square feet of space on earth,

My saplings are still doling out oxygen

under this winter sun,

Even my murder can’t change me

because I’m helpless due to my nature.

 

Now the saw has gone sufficiently deep,

And I get some signs of that eternal sleep,

I feel some unbearable pain in my painless mass,

For death is death after all,

Hope you will understand!

Like hangman’s noose, thick hemp ropes

are tied to direct my fall,

From a safe distance, the tractors pull

to bring down this wooden bull,

And now I feel the pain

as cleavage breaks through that portion

still holding me to my mother earth,

From softest saplings to rock hard tissues

my whole body is panicked,

Saplings are crying like purely innocent children,

Hardest of trunk tissues are shamelessly crying

like battle hard, handsome soldiers after losing a battle,

But who cares!

This big snapping sound is my death cry,

And I fall with a thud,

Yes, man you win,

I’m dead before I thought I will!