The Song of the Evacuees

BY PROF. V. K. GOKAK
(A rendering of the author’s Kannada poem)

In a soulless sea of tears
Near a skeletoned harbour of bones
Pillared and arched with fears
And groans instead of stones,–
There sail the poor evacuees
With little ones on their knees.
What they own is little:
Claypots, all that’s brittle.
They drift both day and night
And they know no mate but sorrow.
Give them, earth mother, give them
The hope of a sweet tomorrow.

Why did the millions madly
Forsake the town for the village?
Why did they leave so sadly
Their homes for the gangster to pillage?
Why ran they helter-skelter
Only for an air-raid shelter?
They merely rushed from the devil
To the deep sea of evil.
Better to die in the city,
Of a bomb or bursting shell,
Than to live as if ’twere a pity
And face both hunger and hell!

At the time of the breaking of nations
How the millions surge and crowd
In the trains and railway stations
Sneered at by the proud!
Ground-nuts they eat and sleep
On the platooned platforms and weep.
The poor,–they have no charter;
No help from any quarter.
The look of the child that sucked
Its mother’s blood and cried,–
Took by the roots and plucked
The heart that ached at my side!

On! not to me the glory
Of the song of sunset and dawn
And not to me the story
Of the nymphs that dance and are gone.
Mine be the song of sorrow
And its everlasting morrow.
Not the song of Apollo
(Today it ringeth hollow)
But the song of the self same god
When he came in a golden shower
And sowed on the earth which he trod
The seeds of love and power.

Oh! this ocean of tears
Shed by the sons of the poor
How it engulfs the spheres
And drowns the deed and the doer!
May the rails that mingle
Till they become single,
Empty beyond the skies
Their load that’s born and dies,
The farther away from earth
The nearer is it to heaven.
Is the only song that is worth
The while of the man who has striven.

And yet a hope there twinkles
In the eyes of the great earth-maiden,
Though her fair face wrinkles
And her heart is sorrow-laden.
In the maze of the musing stars,
When men are jesting at scars,
She spins her daily round
And in her hands are found
The dice which, thrown, might strengthen
And saint the human race
Or else our long rope lengthen
And taint us with disgrace.

The tyrants and dictators
Who wade through blood to glory,
The caverned meditators
With unused wisdom hoary,
The men of pelf and power
Who make agony tower
And the mutinous men of science
With the Devil in alliance.
Ungrateful sons of earth,–
On them the word’s fate hangs.
They are the cause of our dearth
And the pain of all our pangs.

On this the world’s fate hinges
As to whether the great earth-maiden
Bows to them and cringes
Or lifts her sorrow-laden
Face to heav’n lamenting
The wrongs that are dementing
Her very self and cries
Till all the Furies rise
And carry fire and sword
Midst those that trusted them,
And keep, undimmed by the horde,
Her eternal diadem.