Poems for Mumbai’s dead

For Mumbai’s dead,

There is no word, nor no grief, deep enough. Instead, poems by more gifted writers, for what solace they may offer.

The Diameter of a Bomb.

The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters, with four dead and eleven wounded. And around these, in a larger circle of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered and one graveyard. But the young woman who was buried in the city she came from, at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers, enlarges the circle considerably, and the solitary man mourning her death at the distant shores of a country far across the sea includes the entire world in the circle. And I won’t even mention the crying of orphans that reaches up to the throne of God and beyond, making a circle with no end and no God.

                                                                 —  Yehudi Amichai

For everyone who spent last night scouring the Internet, frantic for friends and family:

Is there no thread to bind us — I and he Who is dying now, this instant as I write And may be cold before this line’s complete? And is there no power to link us — I and she Across whose body the loud roof is falling?

Or the child, whose blackening skin Blossoms with hideous roses in the smoke?

Is there no love to link us — I and they? Only this hectic moment? This fierce instant striking now Its universal, its uneven blow?

There is no other link. Only this sliding Second we share: this desperate edge of now.

— Mervyn Peake

For a touch of Victorian affection, folk with some time in their day might attempt the rest of Kipling’s To the City of Bombay  

Surely in toil or fray Under an alien sky, Comfort it is to say: “Of no mean city am I!”

Neither by service nor fee Come I to mine estate — Mother of Cities to me, For I was born in her gate, Between the palms and the sea, Where the world-end steamers wait.

Finally, to extract a brief smile on a bleak day, Roger McGough reading In Case of Fire: