The Power of Words

The US Embassy held a poetry slam recently here in Nepal. Below is a poem from a Nepali youth.

I find it incredibly refreshing. Almost every youth I ever meet (aside from my 17 year-old friend who is my downstairs neighbor) just wants to get out of Nepal. They are sure that the solution to a better life is somewhere else.

There is so much beauty in Nepal, though, on many levels. And Nepal needs it's next generation desperately.



Home
Yukta Bajracharya

All I can see outside from these rose colored glasses
are neatly aligned boxes with big windows that breathe despair
big gates that breathe suffocating
and walking, talking sticks inside them that do not breathe at all.

The air here stifles,
crushes,
murders my every thought. Those cold faces
with hypocrisy painted over them
suck the life out of me.
Vaccums me.
But of course, you won’t hear the noise
you’re too deafened by the
clinking of the coins,
the rough strokes of the ugly green.

And so I sit here wishing
that I could fly to that place
you refuse to call your home.
Fly to that place
that I call home.

Home.
Where,
Poverty rings like temple bells
and smells like plastic full of dendrite.

Yet,
Home.
Where the air redolent in the smell of fresh jasmines,
the buttery smell of sweets from the haluwai,
Warm my soul.

Home.
Where,
Illiteracy, Surfaces as statistics
of people in the West,
dying of diarrhea.

Yet,
Home.
Where when you sit in the dabalis of the Patan Durbar Square
with eighteen rupees a cup tea in your hand
and for once
the world stands still.
You forget all your worries.

Home.
Where the streets are not paved with gold
but with potholes,
Because what fun in treading on smooth pavements?
To not trip once in a while and feel human?

Home.
Where the temple bells ring at early hours in the morning
and again at the not-so-early evening
and again and again and again
until, my spirit start to ring
in unison.

Home.
with shabby houses that smile,
slanting just a little
but standing
through and through the test of time.
The narrow, labyrinthine gullies
that lead you to courtyards of epiphany.
That perfect place of imperfection
where not everything is right,
but everything is alright.

I refute hundreds of your “heavens”
to go back home.
Because home,
is where I belong
Because, home
is where my soul
finds the voice to speak.