By: Priya Anand

Dead bodies on the road
Some prostrate and others still erect
Line the ribonned highway to a metropolis
Still a tenacious connect to the terra beneath
Their ascent to the empyrean terminated by design
Excoriated visages and latitudinous limbs
Their hacked members in a bizarre parody of a kabuki theatre
Narrating a parable of avarice and perfidy
Of Protectors now turned adversaries
Engaged in plunder, pillage and vested interests
Circumference and concentric rings reveal their age
Young and old alike felled and cleaved
A sacrifice to the asphalt Gods that
Have long supplanted the Mother Totem

Note: This poem is based on the felling of trees along the Mysore Ooty Highway between Mysore and Gundalpet to broaden the road and serve a corrupt Government- contractor nexus that make a huge fortune from the sales of wood and securing contracts to widen and asphalt roads