MY NEW POEM ," IN THE FIELD"

                             

(In the Field)

In a world that neither acknowledges  

nor encourages,  

we still draw the line and stand.  

What if the chariot is empty today?  

What if no Murlidhara answers,  

and the sky returns only silence?  

What if the Kurus multiply their fronts  

just to exhaust us, to break us?  

Still ,  act we must.  

Action is our revolt against indifference.  

Action is our karma when nothing is owed to us.  

We do not wait for meaning to be given.  

We carve it into the world with our hands.  

The field demands one thing:  

That we do not kneel.  

That we fight, 

even unseen.  

That we become the reason

the field remembers

we were here.

( Avtar Mota )

PS

Critique of the poem "In the Field" by a friend who teaches English in the US :

“In the Field” is a poem of secular karma. Mota takes the framework of the Bhagavad Gita in absence of the divine interlocutor, leaving us with action without sanction and duty without witness. The empty chariot and the silent sky are not just images of abandonment, but a statement of metaphysical fact , meaning is no longer given, it must be made. In this void, Mota redefines revolt not as protest, but as persistence: “Action is our karma when nothing is owed to us.” It is an existential ethic, close to Camus, yet grounded in dharma or duty .

Stylistically, the poem is admirable for its austerity. The short, declarative lines, the anaphora of “What if” and “That we”, and the unadorned diction create a tone that is both prophetic and soldierly. Mota writes with moral clarity and restraint. He does not lament; he commands. In doing so, he emerges as a poet of ethical endurance ; one who turns exile, indifference, and silence into the very ground on which the self chooses to stand.

CHINAR SHADE by Autarmota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 India License.
Based on a work at http:\\autarmota.blogspot.com\.