Morning Dew Drop
Morning dew drop
Stop,
Stay
Give me time
Let me see
You,
Your heart
Where I breath my love
Your eyes
Where I reflect myself
Your soul
Where I fly
Your dream
Where my image floats
Your trust
My pure love.
Time is limited
My love is unlimited
WHEN TWO HEARTS BECOME A BATTLEFIELD
By Thị Lan Anh Tran (Aschaffenburg, Germany) & Musharraf Hussain (Assam, India)
This poem employs the conflict between the United States and Iran as an extended metaphor for modern romantic relationships, where retaliation, infidelity, and cycles of emotional warfare leave behind only barren landscapes within the soul. Through the imagery of conflict and reconciliation, it suggests that forgiveness, healing, and the patient rebuilding of trust are the only foundations upon which enduring love can survive and flourish. Ultimately, the poem reflects on the human cost of both war and broken relationships, reminding us that true victory lies not in defeating one another, but in choosing understanding over vengeance and renewal over ruin.
I
You and I were like two nations,
Standing on opposite shores of pride,
Between us drifted the smoke of accusations
And the missiles of old wounds.
II
I launched a cold silence toward you,
You answered with words sharp as steel.
I built fortresses of wounded ego,
You sent armies of resentment across the border.
And somehow,
People still called it love.
III
Yet what kind of love survives
When every sunrise sounds like an air-raid siren?
The messages that once flew
Like swallows of summer
Turned into drones of suspicion,
Circling endlessly above our skies.
The midnight calls
Became alarms.
IV
Neither side would surrender.
I hid memories of another.
You sought comfort in another embrace.
One betrayal answered another,
One wound demanded repayment.
V
We mistook revenge for justice,
And pain for power.
But every scar carved into your heart
Appeared again upon my own.
For war has never known a victor.
VI
Like cities shattered by bombardment,
Roofs collapsed upon children’s dreams.
Old parents sat in silence
Before empty doorways.
Friends divided into camps.
Family tables lost their laughter.
VII
A broken love affair
Is never only the story of two people.
It echoes through generations.
It shakes the faith of children.
It teaches fearful hearts
To lock their doors against tenderness.
VIII
And beyond us,
Beyond our private ruins,
Every human war steals light from the world.
A city burns from ambition.
A nation weeps beneath hatred.
The earth grows heavier
With walls instead of bridges.
The future loses another hand
That might have reached for peace.
IX
Then came the day
When exhaustion conquered pride.
I stood among the wreckage I had created.
You wandered through gardens
Reduced to ash.
X
The new faces arrived,
And disappeared.
The forbidden passions faded
Like smoke in the wind.
For no lasting palace
Has ever been built
Upon the ruins of a burning home.
XI
Many doors opened.
Yet none carried
The familiar fragrance
Of the soul once called home.
XII
And so,
After countless seasons of conflict,
The flags of hostility were lowered.
Not because every wrong was forgotten,
But because love proved more precious
Than victory.
XIII
I learned the courage of apology.
You discovered the strength of forgiveness.
The final missiles were dismantled.
The final barricades came down.
XIV
We returned to one another
As a strait reopens after a storm,
Allowing ships to cross again.
No winners.
No losers.
Only two weathered hands
Patiently rebuilding what had been lost.
XV
And beneath the golden evening sky,
I held you
As one might hold a homeland
Returned at last from war.
XVI
For in the end,
The greatest triumph
Is not defeating one another.
It is standing amid the ruins of the world
And still choosing
To love again.
KHI HAI TRÁI TIM THÀNH CHIẾN TRƯỜNG
Tác giả: Thị Lan Anh Tran (Aschaffenburg, Germany) & Musharraf Hussain (Assam, India)
I
Em và anh giống hai quốc gia
Đứng ở hai bờ kiêu hãnh,
Giữa làn khói của những lời trách móc
Và những quả tên lửa mang tên tổn thương.
II
Anh ném sang em một câu nói lạnh lùng,
Em đáp trả bằng sự im lặng sắc như dao.
Anh dựng lên những hàng rào tự ái,
Em kéo quân của nỗi hờn ghen tiến vào.
Người ta gọi đó là yêu.
III
Nhưng tình yêu nào lại bình yên
Khi mỗi ngày đều là một cuộc không kích?
Những tin nhắn từng là cánh chim mùa hạ
Bỗng hóa UAV dò xét lẫn nhau.
Những cuộc gọi đêm khuya
Trở thành tiếng còi báo động.
IV
Không ai chịu thua.
Anh nhớ người cũ rồi giấu em.
Em tìm một bờ vai khác để trả đũa.
Ông ăn chả, bà ăn nem,
Hai trái tim cùng ký vào bản tuyên chiến.
V
Chúng ta tưởng mình chiến thắng
Mỗi khi làm người kia đau hơn một chút.
Nhưng nào biết đâu,
Mỗi vết thương của đối phương
Đều in dấu lên chính ngực mình.
Chiến tranh chưa bao giờ có người thắng.
VI
Như những thành phố sau bom đạn,
Mái nhà đổ xuống trên tiếng khóc trẻ thơ.
Cha mẹ già ngồi trước hiên nhà trống vắng.
Bạn bè chia phe.
Những bữa cơm mất đi tiếng cười.
VII
Một cuộc tình đổ vỡ
Chưa bao giờ chỉ là chuyện của hai người.
Nó làm tan nát một gia đình.
Làm niềm tin của con trẻ lung lay.
Làm những người từng tin vào tình yêu
Bỗng sợ phải mở lòng thêm lần nữa.
VIII
Và rộng hơn thế nữa,
Mỗi cuộc chiến của con người
Đều khiến thế giới mất đi một phần ánh sáng.
Một thành phố cháy lên từ lòng tham.
Một dân tộc khóc vì hận thù.
Một hành tinh nặng thêm những hàng rào.
Một tương lai bớt đi những cái nắm tay.
IX
Rồi đến ngày tất cả mệt mỏi.
Anh nhìn quanh những đổ nát mình gây ra.
Em nhìn lại khu vườn đầy tro bụi.
X
Người mới đến rồi đi.
Những cuộc vui ngoài luồng hóa thành hư ảnh.
Bởi chẳng có lâu đài nào được xây vững vàng
Trên nền móng của một mái nhà đang cháy.
XI
Những cánh cửa khác mở ra,
Nhưng chẳng nơi nào mang mùi quen thuộc
Của người đã từng thuộc về mình.
XII
Và thế là,
Sau bao mùa chiến sự,
Hai quốc gia trong tim hạ lá cờ thù địch.
Không phải vì quên hết lỗi lầm,
Mà vì nhận ra tình yêu quý hơn chiến thắng.
XIII
Anh học cách xin lỗi.
Em học cách tha thứ.
Những tên lửa cuối cùng được tháo ngòi.
Những hàng rào cuối cùng được dỡ bỏ.
XIV
Ta trở về bên nhau
Như eo biển sau bão tố lại mở đường cho tàu thuyền qua lại.
Không còn ai thắng.
Không còn ai thua.
Chỉ còn hai bàn tay chai sần
Lặng lẽ xây lại những gì đã mất.
XV
Và trong hoàng hôn của một ngày yên tiếng súng,
Anh ôm em
Như ôm cả quê hương
Vừa trở về sau chiến tranh.
XVI
Bởi cuối cùng,
Điều đẹp nhất không phải là đánh bại nhau,
Mà là sau tất cả những đổ nát của thế gian,
Ta vẫn chọn ở lại,
Để yêu nhau thêm một lần nữa.
© 2026 Thị Lan Anh Tran (Aschaffenburg, Germany) & Musharraf Hussain (Assam, India)
Mọi quyền được bảo lưu.
OUR LITTLE HAVEN
I cannot promise you the treasures of the world,
nor place great riches in your hands.
But I can offer you my own,
and a smile whenever yours begins to fade.
I cannot mend every sorrow you will face,
nor work miracles to make them disappear.
But I can soften their weight with my presence,
and hold you close whenever the pain draws near.
I will never feed you empty hope,
or claim that tomorrow will erase your tears.
But I want you to know that I will remain,
whenever your beautiful eyes are filled with them.
I do not wish to stand beside you only
when the sun paints the sky with light.
I want to be there when the storms arrive,
even the fiercest hurricanes of life.
When the silence inside you tightens its grip,
as though it steals the air you breathe,
never pretend to be strong for my sake.
Cry… and I will cry beside you,
for true friends never turn their backs.
I am not one whose lips awaken
only to scatter hollow words.
I’d rather sit with you in quiet,
searching together for that little place
where weary souls find healing.
Hand in hand, we will walk this road,
laughing when joy finds us,
weeping when life demands it.
Together when happiness smiles our way,
and together when sorrow waits
just around the corner.
Danijela Ćuk
Croatia
Fourth Installment of Otherwise: The Children’s Crusade
by Christopher Bernard
Chapter Twelve: The Subway Stop That Time Forgot
“. . . and we were just starting to explore the books in the burned down library when she found us,” Petey said, finishing his description of the boys’ adventures since riding Dr. Sazerac’s balloon to a crash the day before.
A look passed between a tall, black-haired, serious-looking young man, vaguely Eurasian, maybe seventeen, who Petey guessed was the Ruhtra the girl had mentioned to the guard, and Yram as Petey completed his tale.
“Command of Germanglish theirs not strong be,” Yram said to the young man. “Speak they like books the war in Acirema before.”
“Old Anglish! To its memory all praise!”
“To its memory all praise!”
The three boys and the young man and girl sat around a rickety metal table in a long, low-ceilinged room just beyond the metal door near the abandoned subway station bizarrely crowded with children like refugees from a pillaged school district. The room seemed part of some sort of headquarters or office. Other young people—some very young indeed, yet all of them with the grimly determined looks on their faces of grownups under pressure—were hard at work. They gave the boys little looks of alarm and the air was heavy with tension and hurry, as if something of great moment was pending yet the new arrivals were not so much interrupting the mission as throwing a wrench in it that needed immediate addressing.
The boys had been introduced to the young man as “boys from elsewhere,” a word that seemed to be part of a mysterious code the two seemed to fall into and out of while conferring with each other. The three boys had given their names and the specifics of where they were from, but these drew blank stares and seemed to mean nothing to the other two at the table.
Petey hesitated at the end of his story, but he had heard what they said and saw the look passing between the two and decided to ask the fateful question that had been on the end of his tongue almost as long as the crash.
“Is this Otherwise?”
The young man seemed startled by the question.
“What this ‘Otherwise’?”
Petey had memorized the description he had been given already twice before during his visits, or hallucinations, or psychotic breaks, or whatever they had been, years ago.
“Otherwise is where everything that might have happened but didn’t in the real world, in Howtiz, does happen. With,” he added, “all the consequences.”
The young man looked coolly at him.
“Boy, in your world would I wish to be. Why so sure you from where you come not this ‘Otherwise’?” he said. “How know you this real nicht be? And this be not ‘how it is’?”
Bumper’s eyes seemed to bug out of his head, and Petey detected the tell-tale signs of brain freeze.
The answer shocked Petey as well. The idea had never occurred to him, though he immediately saw how plausible it might look to someone from outside.
It might even be true.
The thought cut through him like ice.
Chace turned very pale.
“How . . . could . . . ?” Bumper tried to get out. Petey had never told Bumper about Otherwise, so this was all new to him.
Chace leaned toward him.
“Don’t even try,” he whispered in Bumper’s ear.
The young man ignored them and turned to Petey.
“Where you are from I do now know,” he said, with a glance at Yram, who gave him a pained look. “Though, admit I, with a long lost past my heart it aches.” He got up and walked around the table. He seemed to get a hunch, and stopped.
“Who the last war won?”
“Which one?” Petey returned.
“Last big one, all the world covering.”
Petey considered. He must mean World War II—that was the last “really big” war that everybody knew about.
“That’s easy,” he said stoutly. “The United States of America.”
Another look, this time more piercing, passed between the young man and Yram.
“Have the Permanent Emergency heard of?”
“Never.” Petey turned to Chace. “Have you?”
“Only what the mater sometimes calls the pater,” Chace replied coolly.
“The Permanent Emergency since the Year of Victory in place.”
“And when was that?” asked Petey, feeling his throat go dry.
“1948.”
“But the Allies won in 1945.”
The young man snorted.
“In 1943 the Alliance, to be precise, lost. Where did you your history learn?”
“In school, like everyone else. America and the Allies won against the Fascists and the Nazis. They stopped the Holocaust! They freed Europe and Asia! It was the greatest victory in the history of the world!”
Petey’s conscience nagged him for exaggerating, after all he couldn’t be certain what he had just said was exactly true, but this guy was so exasperating, he deserved it!
“What this ‘America’? ‘Acirema,’ of course, you mean. Everything backwards you have. The United States of Acirema until 1948 were not pacified.”
“What do you mean,‘pacified’?” Petey demanded. “By who?”
“By Izan, of course. All states disbanded and the name changed to Night Reich of Acirema. The country a kolonie of the Germanish empire ever since has been. You fellows from ‘elsewhere’ truly be!”
“An elsewhere like our own past, most strangely,” said Yram.
Even Chace looked shocked at this.
“Impossible,” said Ruhtra. “And yet so.”
He frowned and tapped the fingers of one hand against the knuckles of the other, then walked a few paces away and motioned Yram toward him. They stood whispering for a minute or two while looking uncertainly at the boys.
“I thought the expression ‘deciding their fate’ was one you only saw in books,” Chace muttered to Petey.
As they talked, the girl said, in a louder whisper, “But Ruhtra, what if . . .”
“Live by ‘ifs,’” the young man replied, “and ‘when’ we never shall reach.”
A moment later they returned.
“Gentlemen,” Ruhtra said, almost apologetically, “To have to do this sorry I am. Your existence more in danger be than you possibly can know. In safekeeping we must for the time being place you . . .”
“Safe!” said Petey. “From who? From what?”
Ruhtra gave him an ironic look.
“From yourselves first. Not for long it will be, we promise.” He added, almost to himself, and somewhat enigmatically: “Either way.” He motioned to Yram, who nodded and took out the Luger she had put in her pocket on entering the subway maze.
“Sorry, fellows, I be,” she said, then motioned the pistol toward an inner door. “Please.”
There are offers one can’t refuse, as Petey had learned from the movies, so the boys reluctantly left the long dimly lit room under the eyes of the busy young people there, watching them curiously as they trailed out into a dark, fusty jungle of brackets and piping, walls of rebar and metal gridding, clumps of hanging wires, dust-covered light bulbs, curtains of spider web, and the sounds of scurrying rats till, after what felt like they had been wandering through a labyrinth of mid-twentieth-century industrial technology for a quarter of an hour, they reached a small door under a dim light from a grid of thick glass in the sidewalk twenty feet above, with a defaced sign displaying a triangle in red and the words “DANGER 20,000 VOLTS.”
Which the girl ignored, opening the door with one hand and motioning the boys inside. The door was so small, they had to crawl to get in, though once they were past the door, they found themselves in a cement-walled room, a cell just big enough for the three of them. A single bulb hung from the center of the ceiling. On the floor, there were the remains of someone’s supper.
“Later back I will be,” said the girl, taking the dish from the floor. “To bring you something to eat actually you are able.”
“Can I have a coke?” asked Bumper, with nervous politeness. Bumper’s parents had bred good manners in their boy almost to a fault. He responded to danger with a politeness that grew more exaggerated with the extremity of the danger.
“Yes,” said Yram. “Bring you a coke I can.”
Well that’s a nice surprise! thought Petey. At least it isn’t pronounced “ekoc.”
“How terrible feel we – how terrible feel I – about doing this to you I wish you to know,” the girl said as she stood at the door. “The danger you be in you cannot know. Or the danger we be in. And better to be safe it be . . .”
“‘. . . than sorry,’” said Chase. “Some clichés are the same even in Otherwise.”
Petey gave Chace a rueful look. Now maybe he’d believe in it, wherever it actually was, if they ever got home.
“But just how sorry you do not know you could be,” she said sternly at Chace’s quip. “And if you lucky you be, find out you will never.”
Then she closed the door.
“Now do you believe it?’ Petey said to Chace as they stood under the bleakly burning light bulb. Though he immediately regretted it.
Chace shrugged.
“Believe what?” asked Bumper.
“Now I’d believe in the tooth fairy,” said Chace.
Bumper was mystified.
“You mean you don’t believe in the tooth fairy?” Bumper asked, appalled.
Chace patted Bumper on the back.
“Far be it for me to insult the tooth fairy,” he said. “But I have to admit: there are times I have my doubts.”
Bumper nodded gravely.
“Sometimes I do too,” he said. “Even about Santa Claus . . .”
Chace frowned and mimicked Bumper’s nod.
Petey felt he was about to burst. What did the tooth fairy and Santa Claus have to do with Otherwise? And he was haunted by what Ruhtra had said. Everything that had happened to them, and that had struck him as uncanny and horrible, fell into place if what the young man said was true.
Yet, what if everything Petey had ever lived had been a mirage, and this horror (because it was a horror, almost beyond imagining, yet just possible enough to have been true all the time) what if this was “reality” . . . ?
But what was this? A world where the greatest evil he had ever heard of had won? How could that be possible?
“Well, I can’t believe it,” he said, following his own thoughts.
“What?” said Chace, with an ironic look at his friend. “You mean you’re the one who doesn’t believe now?”
“Not that,” Petey said. “This. I can’t believe where we are. I can’t believe this is real.”
“Well, if it’s your fancy Otherwise after all,” said Chace, “it’s just one possibility among a fabulous infinity of them all. Though it’s a pretty awful one.”
“But you heard what Ruhtra said. What if where we’re from is ‘just one possibility’ and what if this is the ‘real world’ and we’ve managed somehow to, I don’t know, miss it—not live in it, never have lived in reality at all? What if we’re just some kind of dream that managed to escape into the real world?”
“Watch it, old son,” said Chace. “You’re getting philosophical.”
“No, I’m not, life is,” said Petey, more philosophically than he realized. “I’m just waking up.”
“Dangerous thing,” Chace muttered. “Waking up.”
Bumper looked back and forth between the two of them.
“What are you two guys talking about?”
“Oh to be young again,” said Chace (who was fourteen), with a nostalgic sigh. “When we were fancy free and not haunted by unanswerable questions.”
Bumper scowled. He was old enough to know when he was being patronized.
“I may be little,” he said, which is how he interpreted “young,” “but I’m not stupid!”
“I didn’t say you were stupid, I said . . .’
“Yes, you did! That’s what you meant!”
“How do you know what I meant?”
“Because I’m not stupid!” And Bumper looked like he was about to tear Chace’s eyes out or perish trying.
“Stop it!” shouted Petey. “Behave yourselves! Don’t fight!” he added, echoing a mantra he had heard often enough from his parents. “Or we’ll never get home again.”
Bumper slumped down on the cement floor and suddenly started whimpering. The other boys looked at him in dismay.
Petey crouched down next to him and put his arm around the little boy’s shoulder.
“I miss home!” Bumper sobbed.
“Me too,” said Petey.
Chace was about to say something sarcastic, but wisely kept it to himself.
“We’ll get there,” said Petey.
“Oh?” asked Bumper, between sobs. He gave Petey a skeptical look. “Just how, smarty pants?”
“I don’t know how. But I know one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“We got here.”
“That’s irrefutably true,” said Chace from the airy heights above them.
“So there’s a way back there. It’s like we slipped through a crack. We just have to find the crack again.”
“The miracle of reverse engineering, as the pater says,” said Chace.
Petey thought: And slip through even if it’s back to an illusion.
But no: he must not let himself think that. This was the illusion, whatever people here thought. Where he and his friends had come from was reality. They had to get back to the real world. Though the journey might be a long one.
Bumper wiped his eyes.
“But what’s Otherwise?” he said. “And how can ‘otherwise’ be a place?”
Chace groaned as he remembered having the same endless, irresolvable debate with Petey years ago.
“Don’t even think about asking that question!” he said.
“But I already did,” said Bumper innocently.
“That doesn’t mean it gets an answer,” said Chace, definitively closing the discussion.
Chapter Thirteen: The Link
Petey, making himself as comfortable on the cement floor as cement would allow, told Bumper about his two visits to Otherwise (while Chace twisted his lips into a glossary of skeptical pouts, groaning at intervals to express the munificence of his self-denial in not crushing Petey’s claims with sarcasm): the first “when I was almost your age,” on a crooked yellow trolley to the land of the gentle Paonas invaded by the barbarous and brutal Korgans, about Sharlotta (he sighed a little when he remembered her, and his voice gave a little squeak), and how the two of them saved her parents and ended the invasion in a great conflagration.
Then the second time when he and “a friend” (he gave Chace a reproachful glance; Chace, who had never recovered from his “amnesia” about the adventure, suddenly looked as innocent as the snow) were swept out to sea and captured by old-time pirates, then held captive in the brig with a gruff bulldog and a fancy cat until a battle sank the pirate ship, and Petey and his friend and the cat and dog spent days clinging to a piece of wreckage until they were cast on an island ruled by foxes, and Petey and his friend were tried by a court of animals for the crimes of humanity against the animal kingdom over the centuries . . .
“Wow,” said Bumper, “that sounds harsh! My mom’s vegan. But she lets me eat meat because she says if I don’t, I won’t grow.”
Bumper, of course, was little. Chace gave him a look that suggested he might benefit from a diet that was strictly carnivorous.
“Do you think they would have put me on trial?”
“I was eleven,” said Petey, letting that sink in. Age wouldn’t exactly have protected his young friend.
Bumper blinked.
“So,” he asked somberly, “did they hang you?”
“No,” said Petey. “The cat and dog testified in our favor, and we eventually escaped from the island.”
Bumper grew contemplative.
“And so you think we’re in Otherwise now.”
“Yes. Though I keep hoping,” said Petey, “I’ll wake up and realize this is just a bad dream. But after what Ruhtra said, I’m not so sure I want to wake up, now, at all, ever.”
Bumper put on his best daddy look.
“What do you think, Chace?”
Chace’s eyes perceptibly darkened.
“Whether or not we’re in Otherwise,” he said, “we’re someplace that’s really, as the pater would say, ‘fookéd up.’”
Bumper looked shocked when he realized exactly what Chace had just said. His mom, though she was lenient about what he put into his mouth, was not about what came out.
“Oh!” said Bumper.
The boys settled down for a long wait, Petey in a corner with his forehead against his drawn-up knees, Chace sprawled near the opposite wall and staring at the ceiling, Bumper crouched near the door and absent-mindedly picking his nose.
Petey, for the hundredth time, went over what had happened since they launched in Dr. Sazerac’s balloon an eternity ago. Everything here was so familiar and yet so eerie! He couldn’t be just dreaming (which everyone had accused him of when he had tried to describe Otherwise to them), and yet it couldn’t be real! It was like the world he was used to, but everything was upside down. And backwards!
“Do you know what spiders do after they make their cobwebs?” Chace suddenly asked philosophically as he stared up at the ceiling.
“Spiders?” Bumper asked with a quivering voice. He stopped mid nose-pick. He was scared of spiders.
“They,” said Chace giving a deep yawn and stretching his arms as far as they would go, “take a lonnnng nap.”
“How do you know that?”
Chace pointed toward the ceiling.
Bumper looked up.
The ceiling’s four corners were veiled with cobwebs, with several more connecting three of them and one solitary web luffing like a sail mysteriously in the airless cell. A spider lay curled up in the web, asleep. Around it were the remnants of several ingested flies.
Bumper was about to yell in panic when there was a noisy clanking from the cell door. A moment later, it opened with a squeal, and Ruhtra and Yram entered, crawling through the small door.
They stood up under the single hanging bulb and looked down solemnly at the boys, who remained on the floor. The cell felt suddenly very crowded.
Ruhtra glanced away and cleared his throat.
“An apology to you I feel I owe,” he said. “Who you are I couldn’t be sure, and our position here precarious be. Even we about spies must worry. About you I had absolutely sure to be. But all our researches with nothing about any of you.came up. According to all official records, you not to exist.”
Chace pinched his arm hard.
“Ouch!” he said. “I exist, all right. I feel pain, therefore I am. Not sure about you guys,” he added, giving the other two boys a glance. “You could be figments of my imagination. Though if so, I never knew it was so weird.”
“Oh you, truly, exist,” said Ruhtra. “Though best it might be if we all figments of someone’s imagination were and not in the cage of reality locked. But the three of you in a peculiar state be—both here and not here. Officially nonexistent, but, in all practical respects, the most real thing there be, precisely because not recognized as being at all.” He paused, looked hard at them before continuing. “Dissidents to the occupation we be. To a network called the Link dedicated to liberating Acirema from Izan we belong.. Dedicated to the destruction of Izan, to the liberation of Acirema. Because not possible it is in a world with them in it to live. At all.”
He paused and gave them a long stare. Yram gave him a worried look, but said nothing.
“This you need to know about us: that we of children are entirely made, from as young as four and five to as old as myself, seventeen, and a few even older, but kept among the young so suspected we not be by Izan. The adults to Izan rule long have capitulated, calling this ‘to be mature,’ to ‘grow up,’ to ‘accept reality.’ But our position be that certain realties there are to accept one must never. And that to change those realities we can and must—to them overthrow and new realities to create, out of imagination, passion, ingenuity, determination, and, not least, out of memories of a kinder and freer way of life before our conquest, brief as it shall be, by this evil. And with a little luck, the chance be that our way goes. That the lesson of history be, over and over, down the ages: just when despair most justified seems, a stubborn good seizes and takes. Our memories and our dreams to us give hope and us keep alive. This, we believe, the lesson of life itself be, down upon us millions of years: the life that the earth itself be, has been and shall be, until the end of time. And we a duty have—some call the blessing of reality itself—on that lesson to act. In our case, this dictatorship to bring down.”
“Do they call it fascism here?” asked Petey.
“To Fascismo allied it is, it divides with it Eporue, across the Eastern Sea. Our duty is our world from both Fascismo and Izan to liberate. The adults childish call us. We it call—”
Suddenly the roar of an explosion echoed down the tunnels outside.
“Tihs yloh!” Ruhtra said to Yram in alarm. “That ours be?”
“Not that one,” said Yram.
All five of them froze and listened. At first there was a long, deep silence, strangely hollow and empty, as though the elaboration of steel and concrete that surrounded them were waiting for another explosion. Then a muted sound of screaming, as of a mass of panicking children, rolled by in a muddy roar just outside closed door of the cell. Petey heard one word in the white noise: “Poliz!” that immediately washed away.
The young man and woman—looking suddenly much younger than their actual years, more vulnerable than their pretense of competent command had led them to appear to the boys—stared at each other with faces drained pure white.
“A mole!” Ruhtra said in a strangled voice.
A distant sound of tumult, shots, shouting echoed through the subway tunnels.
“Izan,” said Ruhtra, having retained control of himself.
“Plan . . .,” Yram ventured, with a look of despair, “. . . Zero?”
“Not enough bombs primed,” the young man replied coolly. “Only a platoon’s worth with us take down.”—He sniffed at the air, reminding Petey of his family’s pet retriever smelling something undetectable to his human owners. Then Petey smelled it too, smoke penetrating from the tunnels outside, mingling with the noise. Every so often a single scream pierced the tumult.—“Burning the papers at central.” Ruhtra paused. “Betrayed we may be but no excuse to play martyrs to betray the cause.”
The blood in the faces of the three boys suddenly drained away to the dead white of the other two. The thought dawned bleakly on Petey: Is Plan Zero to blow themselves up, to take down the attacking Izan with them?
Ruhtra carefully opened the metal door and he and Yram crawled through and led the boys out to the tunnels, which were quickly filling with smoke and clearer echoes of the rough clangor of attack and high-pitched screaming punctuated by sounds of shots.
A small mass of the children had already filled the main, dimly lit tunnel that the Izan had not yet found; they were eerily silent, disoriented and lost. At the sight of Ruhtra and Yram they stopped and stared at them, half hopefully, half despairingly.
Ruhtra seemed to fully regain his authority at the sight of the frightened children. The distant noises were coming closer. Hard decisions had to be made fast.
Attack the attackers and face near certain annihilation—or try to escape, with possibly the same result? Petey could see the bleak choice at war in the older boy’s countenance.
Then Ruhtra’s face slackened into a look of grim seriousness.
“For more survivors we cannot wait,” he muttered in an aside to Yram. “If to save these we can.”
Yram looked appalled but said nothing.
Ruhtra gestured toward a hefty fourteen-year-old nearby.
“Ganzor,” Ruhtra said in a stage whisper, “your battalion take to the old storm reservoir, and for instructions wait.”
“All day we have not eat. At least lunch can we have?”
“And where that be? White Castles our style not just yet.”
Ruhtra looked at a beautiful Slavic girl standing just behind Ganzor.
“Tatiana, your troops take through the West Village sewer to the Chelsea warehouse.”
Tatiana nodded unsmilingly.
“What if already it they have took?”
“Then it burn down,” he said. “And your people scatter. If hear from you I do not, I will know.”
She again nodded unsmilingly.
“Where Dewitt?”
A thin squinting fifteen-year-old who looked more like a math nerd than a militant, waved from the back of the crowd.
“Your people hide in the service tunnel from the Little Flower’s days that never on any map was found, then south move after the Izan the station clear and in the old Staten Island ferry landing take cover.”
“What about Chingu’s people?” asked Ganzor with a reproachful look.
“Go back now we cannot go,” Ruhtra said. “Who we can we save. And the best for them hope.”
“The survivors they will torture!” Tatiana blurted out.
“Quiet!” Ruhtra said. “All of us they will kill if here they us find. Now, everyone, go!”
“Where you go?” asked Dewitt.
“Better for you, better for us, you not to know. Now move. But our motto remember: ‘Silent, secret, sudden—success!’”
Petey watched as various motley groups of kids—this may have been Otherwise, or maybe it was the Real World after all, but kids, it seemed, were kids, all different and all alike, everywhere and at all times; they were all a bit like Bumper, in fact—a combination of silliness, vulnerability and innocence, everyone looking a little lost and wearing clothes never the right size and always a few years out of fashion, with awkward limbs and soft faces and shining eyes that betrayed an obstinate clarity, like an unforgiving mirror—all of them faded away, in eerie silence, down the tangle of shadows that made up the abandoned subway tunnels. As suddenly as the tunnels had filled, they were now empty, though the distant noise from the abandoned station had not let up.
The three boys followed Ruhtra and Yram down a service tunnel they hadn’t noticed just across from them. Darkness, oil and dust closed around them as the metal door shut behind them with a hollow clang.
_____
Christopher Bernard is a prize-winning author of both poetry and fiction. The two earlier stories in the “Otherwise” series are If You Ride A Crooked Trolley . . . and The Judgment Of Biestia (winner of the Independent Press Award in Preteen Fiction and short-listed for the K M Anthru International Literature Award).
Everything
Too many
people
pretending and accepting
what the world has become….
When will we open our eyes
and our hearts
and change everything?
Arrival
You speak
and I listen,
believing
with a flow of tears.
This world temporary,
but You
are forever
helping us
into the Arrival.
Neo-Heroism
NEO-HEROISM OF POST-MODERN TIMES
Dr Jernail S. Anand
When people are suffering through a period of struggle, fighting for a higher ideal, you get leaders who can look back and forth, like Janus, and create a respectable space for themselves, and their people in the future. But, when the times are good, we get leaders who manoeuvre their victory, because people are busy in their luxuries, riding on whose mad dreams, they rise to power, and then squander the fruits of the labour of their predecessors. For a simple comparison, let us think of the sons and daughters of a poor household, who have to sweat it out in life, and they become doctors and lawyers, and bring laurels to the their family and even to the country they belong. But, on other extreme, there are sons and daughters of a rich man, who sweat it out squandering that wealth, finally ending up as ‘lost to society’. When you are born with a silver spoon, there is every possibility of your losing it by the end of your term. The sons and daughters of the rich, who live on luxury of their parents, play ducks and drakes with unearned wealth, and do not care for the society and its norms, do everything the society considers foul, and, no wonder, end up as murderers and smugglers. If the parents had used the principle of “artificial scarcity” for these ‘blessed’ kids, and forced them to earn their own living, rather than live on the luxury of their parents, they too would have joined the life stream as valuable men and women. Rich people, who do not bring up their offspring like this, deny the society, sometimes best people who could have emerged from their ranks.
Was Ravana the sole manifestation of Evil? He had ten heads. It is more symbolic than real. Ten heads means ten or twenty and even more, may be thousands, because, he was manifest evil, which lived in the minds of the people. Every person harbours evil, and when we put it together, we need some emblematic figure.Call it Ravana. So, was Kamsa, the manifestation of Evil. Was Duryodhana the only foul mind in the Kaurava camp? He was the head of a whole body of evil structured in the Kauravas. And, in this evil,the greatest part was played by the ‘Pratigya’ (Vow) of Bhishma. Guru Daron, and great men, who did not utter a word when Draupaudi was being molested, were all a part of the evil which manifested in Duryodhana and Dusashana, and even in Karna. In a way, Duryodhana was the face of this morally corrupt world.
If we look down the ages, in ninth or tenth centuries, we find the warriors who were regarded as the best of men. Odysseus, Hector, Achilles. The Romans have warriors like Caesar who represent the popular mind of those times. In the period of Enlightenment, followed by Victorian period, we come to see, a world which loved writing. And, we see the heroes of this world were Poets, Philosophers and Novelists, like Gorky and Tolstoy. They manifested the popular mindset. People loved their writings, because they epitomised their mental and moral aspirations. Today, we are confronting a world in which every man is drained ofidealism. Good has flowed out of our veins. Junk has made a permanent home in our blood vessels. And it is stinking with ambition, success, passion for wealth, and a blind wish to topple everything that is good in our society, including subversion of all that was good and lofty in the past.
The present times are the times of luxury and people have reaped the fruits of a long spell of suffering and hard work on ideas, ideologies and philosophy. Here we have a whole population which believes in wealth creation, and success, and they need leaders who manifest this public passion. People who do not care for any moral considerations, for whom human life is a ‘deal’ and it is ‘energy’ which electrifies the internal wiring of the world, if these people elect leaders like Trump, they cannot be blamed for doing what they are doing. Leaders like Bibi are the manifestation of the people’s passion for commercial one upmanship, arrogance of power, and trampling all that is good under their feet. The fight of the mighties with countries like Ukraine and Iran sends a shivering message: The good is in steep minority. But it has the guts to stand up to the unified evil of the world, manifest in a few leaders.
THE NEO-HEROISM OF 21STCENTURY
Every age has its own heroes. The 20th century had Mahtama Gandhi, Jawahar Lal Nehru, and Rabindra Nath Tagore. The 21st century is entirely different from the 20th century. It is the century of loss of values, loss of vision, and loss of idealism. It ist a chaotic society which needs someone who can give a face to its moral anarchy. It is futile to look up to men, who could grow beyond their personal obsessions, and give a positive turn to human angst. If every age has its heroes, it has its villains too. The present century a suffers from the loss of language and meaning too. Education that is being served to the young students has lost its moral anchoring. The world is dreaming of becoming Lanka, the City of Gold once again. Can a sane person become a part of this mad dream? There is one more bigger question: Is this dream really mad? Does goodness, values, integrity, honesty have any chance beyond their academic relevance as a good old past? I wonder.
Moreover, in 1975, when Amitabh came up as an odd mix of heroism tempered with villainy, in Deewar, over the times, the line diving heroism and villainy has dissolved. These are times when evil has acquired respectability, and men who are only good, and not evil when required, lose their security deposits. This is a strange world andthe people who lead this chaotic world, are only those who can manifest this odd mix of heroism and villainy. The truth of these times is in conflict with the truth of previous centuries. And anyone who wants to succeed, has to acquire the charismatic qualities of neo-heroism, which manifest the Indian tradition of ‘tam sam dand bhed’ [success at all costs].If morality and ethics are the warf and woof of Indian ethos, we should not forget that these ethos belong to the general run of society, who were impressed by the teachings of saints and sages down the ages. Kings had their moral guides, but how many listened to the sane advice of the moral philosophers?
Even today, a king has to represent the general ethos of the society, which has lost faith in goodness, honesty, integrity, and even truth. Moral philosophers cannot epitomize their dreams of success and luxury. A king who manifests their new found values, (which is the truth of the present century) must manifest all that is good and bad in their dreams. Those who want Gandhi and Nehru and Tagore and their philosphies to guide the population of the 21st century, are perhaps too idealistic, or do not understand the dynamics of time. Time does not flow backwards. Evil has to be given its due simply because good is getting of currency. This is the essential lesson of Neo-Heroism which every one aspiring to lead the nation must absorb.
Dr. Jernail S. Anand, with 200 books to his credit [18 epics] is a Chandigarh-based top-ranking presence in the contemporary world literature, a polymath, and a vital architect of the 21st century ethical literature whose seminal work ‘Lustus: The Prince of Darkness’ challenges the moral complacency of our era. Founding President of the International Academy of Ethics, and Laureate of Charter of Morava [Serbia], Seneca [Italy], Franz Kafka [Germany, Ukraine, Czeck Rep] and Maxim Gorky [Russia] Soka Ikeda and Mahakavi Bharati (India) Awards, his name is inscribed on the Poets’ Rock in Serbia.
Storm
Your homeland is a two-foot tall lonely death
It’s funny to realize the empathy of rain because I don’t have a sky
Spit, urine, semen, blood dripping from the ceiling
I don’t know why the neighbor is screaming in pleasure or pain
Like a forest’s untranslatable name the mirrors ring
Underpants and socks stacked neatly in the closet
And the room and the apartment are gone
And there was never a home
Time licked off the wall
Your father takes off his belt and jerks off to Mercury
The burgundy ass of mankind trembles
Hang my voice from a dead tree
A voice the size of the eye of a needle
A thick silence you can’t drink anymore
A ship of emptiness caught in a red storm
The sailor is asleep: he looks at the stars