Vultures in flight

Our day is breaking below
AT LONG LAST !
Hail the greying, pale sun
Keep pussyfooting, blur the view
of the morons, the sages and the seers
Let stench lull all of them into
weird fantasies and dreams.
Kill the elves and fairies gliding
in the morning breeze
Look at the dawn below,
Wraiths jostle for space
beside fresh corpses littered in the open
I am HUNGRY. An old vulture's
hunger deciphers the times' nightmares
My kin elsewhere feel it right.
They're flying in from the nests of death
But, look, how the birds drop midway,
weary wings giving in to sandstorms
Yet a few can make it.
As we now fly in a dishevelled band
dying to feast on the rot down there
Our beaks are pressed so tight that
We can't even groan in pain.
Dogs fight over cadavers and carcass
My folks and I fly in
the eerie sun, drooling and swearing,
Nothing more yet an apocalypse
for sure, or a tinkering with the Bomb
Foods bake in the sun, flesh turning fossils
The fetid smell leaps into the city sky
making our empty stomachs ache,
Pageants of rot march below, our
hoary eyes lick the death-in-life.

Shihab Sarkar is a poet, novelist and journalist.