AMERICA – 1978

America

And your trillion-dollar Economy

And your FM stereo

And your serpentine highways of lonely people

Slanting westwards into the setting sun

 

Leave me alone

 

I am one of the starving millions of India 

Who you’re mommy asked you to sacrifice

Your Candy for

 

I came because 

This was the land of Greatness and Charisma

Of James Dean and John Kennedy

And my brother who listened to Glen Miller and found his Soul

I came to breathe your air

Eat the salt of your earth

And build great buildings in praise of all you were to me

 

But you have presented me with your soul-less landscape

Your form-letters your form-experiences and your form-civilization

You have presented me only with people 

Whose hearts are lost on your highways

And your abysmal wheels of progress

You have forgotten the helplessness of burning children

In your flash-fire experiences

Of Opulence, TV Westerns and Dow Jones

 

You only serve to numb me now, America

Till I will also begin to chant 

Like a new being whose father is forgotten

‘Think of the starving millions of India

 My act of contrition will put another man on the Moon’

 

One day I will unknowingly be speaking in this strange idiom

And somewhere in the dimming recesses of my memories

A flickering fire will finally die

And I who was so close to starvation and death

Will think only with revulsion and fear

And not sorrow

Of dirt, flies and men

Lying dead from thirst in parched fields

 

And stop eating candy to save my soul

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Sahadev Chirayath wrote this poem in May of 1978 and lives in Buffalo, New York now. He is a Structural Engineer and has spent time with Engineers without Borders in Andhra Pradesh.