By Joe Palathunkal
Namkum, April 28, 2022: Joe Palathunkal, editor of livingfaith.in, on April 23 visited Bagaicha, near Ranchi, where Jesuit Stan Swamy lived until October 8, 1920, when he was arrested by the National Investigation Agency for having alleged Maoist links. Father Swamy died on July 5, 2021, in a Mumbai hospital as an undertrial prisoner.
The poem below is the fruit of Palathunkal’s visit:
There I sat down remembering a man
Who fought for a new dawn
When darkness gulped down
A whole people
Who had nothing but tears
Before a deaf stony wall!
Stan Swamy the man
Walked along with them
Counting every tree
That will be felled
By the ax of misanthropy
Whitewashed as development
He could not sing paeans of a power
That ordered the uprooting of the trees
Under whose shade a people sat
Breathing pure air while watching
Silver cascades flowing down the hills
And all on a sudden
A Hiroshima stared at them
Asking them to keep finger on their lips
But Stan’s voice reverberated
Across the hills and loudly proclaimed
That he was not a silent spectator
While the deaf walls of power felt
Truth will be bitter and will grow bitterer
And decided social justice must go to the gutter.
Handcuffs fell on Stan Swamy
When the trees of Bagaicha wept and bled.
Source: https://www.livingfaith.in/faith/by-the-trees-of-bagaicha/