A humble gift

A humble gift

 

Gratitude in any magnitude

can never touch the altitude

of a mother’s love, priceless,

her care and sacrifices,

her penance and pain

and her love and strain

that row her offspring

across life as a human being.

Adore I on my inner altar

my Alma-mater as my second mother.

At these twilight days

the days with her when I gaze

I feel belittled and guilty

that I have failed in my ordained duty

to offer her my gratitude

when my inner voices feud

“Can it be my contribution

to uphold and enhance her reputation?

Can it be upholding human values

taught by her never to lose?”

On logic with counter logic

both divine and barbaric

my conscience decried my failure

as against dream to be a world-beater

when I bade her adieu fifty years back

all memories frustrating me running as a flashback.

when I have had to go physically to her loving lap.

as my batch mates meet after half a century gap

The thoughts pensive

that her nothing I could give

as on both fronts my failure

dreamt while being with her

dejected me, I had to repent

over the life I had already spent

serving for own bread and butter

brutally murdering nature

degrading the creation being poorer

than when I was entrusted to see it prosper,

sacrificing values to successes

to the demand of my selfish purposes.

Brooding over my days with her

with then from grass blade to professor

I prayed the Lord for atonement

and ways to her me how would I present.

Flashed in me

on her to plant a banyan tree

mother India’s national tree

that hardly now we see

being dispensed away

to run the national highway

for human prosperity

and a nuisance for electricity,

Trees of centuries-old

tranquilizing to behold

mute witness to human dexterity

are succumbing to human brutality.

To my astonishment

every event by event

happened over distant communication

from sapling, plaque and authority's permission

Even to plant, the guest

was at providence behest

from among alumni dear to Alma-mater

who left all allures to serve her.

On the pro-republic day of twenty-twenty

in its chilly morning, her choicest alumnus planted it.

It all hampered on its own

as it seems, the tree has divine destination

Dreamt then I a distant day

many many decades away

the banyan tree in its ecstatic grandeur,

its green foliage, hanging root to allure

with no monkey, no crow , no vulture

in place new species, me that blurs

Professors and students having open-air discussions

Pray the Lord, float there for them many Newtonian lessons.

that will breed in them many Nobel laureates of future

who will be sympathetic to creation and nature

promising not to destroy and disturb the creation

for human greed as their predecessors have done,

the cool air the serene atmosphere below the tree

its past history from net the students can imagine to see

the deities of the village at its trunk

the white anthill over meditation monk

many such thoughts blaze my spirit/

To my Alma-mater, as it is my humble gift

 

 

 

 

P K Routray

In the service of Lord

 

(I passed from NIT then REC Rourkela Orissa India in 1970. On the occasion of Golden Jubilee A banyan tree was planted.)