There's something like that.
It does exist, doesn't it?

Poverty, is earning less than ₹ 47 a day.

That's less than a dollar a day.
Who earns less than a dollar a day?
Beggars in Manhattan make more than that.

There is no poverty.
There's nothing like that.

Wait a minute: *beggars in Manhattan?

Packets of peace cordoned off by fences and barbed
wire, hooded lush in manicured fields.

Endless stream of labour crossing over water pikes:
hear, no see - river in the bush.

Emerges curved a mirror on a pole: three directions,

The three birds, tinier than my forefinger, eating grain.

Lisping away in the wood the warbler and the shrike.

Wild flower, pops out red from a corner
of the cultivated green: and I am...

On a shore flooded in the tide.

Now     on a         flitting            log:

Rain,     trying     to fill up
the ridges white,

that,      I,             along with
*****, snails and           tiny        starfish
are ambling to escape from.

The trees, they are       laughing wet.
As are the            distant           waves,
snapping on returns.

Is that it? Samsonite...No, mine's a no-name.

I thought red would do - red unique.
But, my, so many reds on this belt.

The wait, for prized possessions
checked in - clothes for the trip, and razors!

Thought much of myself when
I ran ahead at Immigration, but
the posh lady I raced, walks off now -
she's found her red.

The belt's stopped now. We are all packed.
Hope's never lost if not found yet!

FILO says my neighbour-in-line: First in, Last Out,
kind enough to explain. Well shouldn't it be
LIFO? I wondered, the late loafer that I am.

Yawns - shorter to fly, longer at the belt!

Red, red, everywhere...now
an American Tourister, snooty.

But mine's a no-name
ribbed red, economy class beauty:

and am waiting...

This is the night of the distant circles.
Tonight the gulls are in meditation.
Senora, tonight, I find your tracks
disappearing on the shores,
though the tide is afar.
I saw you, draped in a garment of colours, and
adorned of the golden dot on your forehead
vanish at the horizon.
In the morning when you
emerged fresh from the shower of mists
with your clouden hair still wet,
I was the wheezing breeze flying West.
I was the bumblebees returning to roost.
Now I am conversing with the echoes.
I want to decipher the language of the waves
whispering to the stars.

Last of a beloved set
of bone China plates
just developed a lesion.

I celebrate this journey in the desert -
I am but a traveler in my time:
in this pasture of my fathers, land,
where stands this miracle of glass
now calling manna down
from the high home of eagles:
I am but a helpless everyman, lost
in the desert, on a journey out
from the clutches of misery, and pain;
The world is making progress.
As I see the oases running farther
away from my sights: on
elevators to the skies, numbers
of the young call on benefactors
across the seas, for a ropeway
across the quagmires: a home, a car
and the family life; saving for a
better day, in the future, while
my home went from mudbrick
to thatched grass, then out on streets
by the gutter with the dogs;
I am a cleaner, cobbler, janitor
in the land where I was the tiller.
Wiping the sweat on my brows
as I loaf on the lawns, awaiting
labour days hyphenated by mealtimes,
there is no witch-doctor now, and
no money to pay up at the hospitals
that the wealthy from afar line up to,
but to die helpless a wretched death,
I celebrate my helplessness!