Karna

|This happened to be a piece I'd penned last year right after I read this book called 'Mrityunjaya-The Death Conqueror'. The life of Karna is one of the most fascinating and tragic stories I've ever come across. He happens to be my most favorite character in The Mahabharata alongside Draupadi and Krsna. I keep attempting to sketch him again and again and never have I been satisfied with what I complete as it never seems to represent him in entirety. The artwork can be found on my blog, here. Cheers! Revel in His life, for it's complicated and beautiful. |



What is more trying by destiny, oh warrior

 than to be painfully oblivious to the origin of your birth?

You who slayed vice with smoldering golden rays

later blanketed in the smog of your munificence

sparked from vanity leased out in thy head;

exorcising material despair,

subduing with grains of praise the

licking ravage flames in your chest,

under the gilded skin armour, shut.

What could have been more ruthless

than the rejection of the dark-skinned maiden-

flinging insults like dung to a damp wall

while your strength lay untested and unapproved?

The woman you loved and hated within eons;

that your brothers  five later betrothed ,undivided

only to garrote you to shameful death.

What decremented your virtuous soul further?

the culminated fury abreast constant light

of doubt-ridden guilt about your legacy

Or losing your honour to jealousy

Beginning a vow out of an unnecessary jabbering

of the tongue unsaddled by righteous thought?

And when you saw your confounded flaws

mirrored on the deceitful glass of an angered moment,

You saw the image that your blue-skinned kin saw,

an enemy you endured with till your

chariot broke

while fighting with the universal wheel of time-

the only aid to defend the dead in you.

There were those grains of sand that fell through

the goodness, your blood dripping onto the muddy moulds

fusing towards an unjustified departure

defended in the karmic book of a godly conman.

The hourglass now contains merely light

in honour of a hero, tragic 

thus denied a deemed title

because his own blood feared the words

out of an unworthy stranger, spitting in the air.

~Hemu 

Source: Vimanika Comics