A RED STAR SHINING FROM INDIA

Manu Kant



Comrade Manu Kant, is a journalist and editor from New Delhi, India. His haiku are refreshing, sharp and engaged - the most acute and politically active haiku I met until today in actual world of haiku... One of my favorite, perhaps haiku I wanted to write myself many times during endless formalistic discussion with American haiku poets:


haiku vs senryu business--
tell me instead if America
is a totalitarian capitalist state?


Other haiku too actual and sharp. How many of us dare to write so direct poetry?


Colorado gunman - a joker?
Who were the soldiers in Iraq?
& who are in Afghanistan?

Batman movie shooting--
I recall Reagan's words:
'The USSR is an evil empire'

another US shooting--
just like the cyclical crisis
of capitalism

a missing Alzheimer's patient--
oh, my Soviet nostalgia
so tenacious

before the mirror--
a Dalit* makes up
for a smile to alight on her face

* the lowest rung of Hindus in the casteist Hindu religion who generally do all the manual & menial work. Dalit is a designation for a group of people traditionally regarded as untouchable.

drought conditions--
the poor farmer's eyes
a broken mirror

12 killed in Colorado shooting--
sunrise
I scatter feed to the pigeons

a rush of Soviet nostalgia
I inhale the
beedi's smoke

this talk, again
of Lenin's burial
why not his resurrection?

telling my daughter about the Soviet Union-
I begin with
once upon a time

aerophobia--
my daughter's maiden flight
to see Lenin entombed

reading Krupskaya's reminiscences--
Lenin didn't get October
on a platter

kulak*
with a human face-
there must be a copyright violation

*a big landlord in Russian

fresh reports of Lenin's burial--
reading Krupskaya's* reminiscences
Lenin springs to life

* Lenin's wife

you swear by your Santa--
I have seen kid ragpickers
giving our world a second chance

I bump into my ex-psychiatrist--
she tells me
'you can step into the same river twice'

Marx on hold--
my 8-yr-old daughter
still obsessed with Barbie

two decades after the Soviet Union
my class angst
at a boiling point

47th birthday-
my daughter counts the years
I am older to her

with my ex-Soviet girl
on the Moscow streets--
now bearing different name


winter early morning -
on the pot
reading Lunacharsky's Lenin

peering closely at the tag
American flag
made in China

rising above
the National Anthem
the ringtones