RESPONSE

For Umar Khalid

The streets are not painted with graffiti.

Angry banners do not fly against the sky.

People do not walk across cities, rallying voices

Against the incarceration of a young man.

They have hired clever masons to build walls around him.

But he spreads outside those walls.

They talk about him in quiet corners

And it spreads like a whisper that cannot be silenced.

“Where is he?” they ask,

They who have made him prisoner to their fears.

“Why do we hear his voice beneath our throne

And in the quietness of our homes?”

He has become the voice among voices,

He has become the anger that lurks among the silenced,

He has become the love that lingers beyond fear,

He has become the hope that teeters on the edge of a prayer.

He has become larger than his name, Umar Khalid.

He has multiplied beyond a number in a prison.

He has entered into the crevices of our remembering.

He has become the unease of our present.

Those walls are searching for him.

They were built to enclose him.

But he is no longer within them.

He is prowling in the streets,

He is trespassing into dreams,

He is stoking the embers of love

In the winter of hate. 

By Parinitha

Umar Khalid- The Inquliabi

O... foot soldiers of night

do you really believe

that you prosecuted the dawn

By imprisoning the ray of light…

listen, you knights of night...

Umar Khalid is

a north star

that brightens the dark sky

a last sigh of enduring  pain

the mother suffers

while giving birth to a new life

a lamp inside

ensuring

the engulfing darkness

won't seep inside of us too

a boundary line of truth

to ensure

lies doesn't trespass

Hence

to remember Umar Khalid

is to continue

the fight of memory

against forgetfulness

hankering for love

in the times of

organized hate.

ethical and eternal vigilance

amidst helplessness, despair and delusion

Of course...

Umar is a terrorist

against the Empire  of lies

an anti-national

who planted a bomb

of love

in the fort of hatred

a conspirator

who hid a spark of truth

in a box full of deceit

O..knight of nights

write down my name too...

write it next to that of Umar

in your list of terrorists

my name is Shivasundar

Umar and Me

share the same ancestry

my address: Free Universe  

By Shivasundar

(Translated from Kannada by Samvartha Sahil )