Poem: Sounds of Silence

The Sounds of Silence,

That plague the hallway,

The frequent, disrupting cadence,

That fastens the floor’s decay.

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The hallway to liberation, they call it?

The path to a better reality,

The gateway to a dome of stimuli, isn’t it?

Where sounds reverberate after every calamity.

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The cadence is striking,

It adds an effect to fate,

The silence is not considered frightening,

But the impact is worse than hate.

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The floor looks wooden from afar,

The planks look cracked and flayed,

They are actually nails, burnt and charred,

Metal in nature, but naturally attained.

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There are paintings on the walls,

Different shapes and sizes, different paints,

But all of them are panicked calls,

Blotched and disfigured by blood stains.

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The first painting is bright,

Of two men, a quarter of the way late,

They are red as if bathed by a shield of sunlight,

But it’s piercing their bodies, deciding their fate.

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The second painting is bucolic,

Covered by a field of sugarcane,

But there lies a body, like a note unmelodic,

In the rhythm of silence, looks like a minor pain.

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The third painting is different,

It’s of a bus, travelling in the rain,

With pedestrians raising placards, like a deterrent,

But the traffic of silence, is the driver’s disdain.

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When a child walks through this deserted hallway,

He slips on the floor, his foot falls in a hole,

Hoping to see the paintings, hoping to hear what they say,

But his body goes limp, out of his control.

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As the nails grow bigger, swallowing him like prey,

He tries to make a noise, tries to tell the world,

But he is consumed, only his hands left grey,

And his nails join the lot, pale and curled.

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There goes another voice, 

Another bright spark of light,

Another fire put out, the spirits in the hallway rejoice,

What could he have done, they say, it isn’t his fight.

By: Divit Chopra

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