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 

When I have a son

  And when my little son walks in while I feed my infant,
  I wouldn't shoo him away and draw up my clothes;
  but hold him by my side and give him a kiss.
  I'd tell him, 'Son, you drank my milk like this when you
  were much younger.
  These are breasts that fed you
  and I am the woman who gave birth to you.
  Stare at your sister's eyes and see the joy
  in the suckling that fills that tiny little body
  that you see everyday
  and learn it's only flesh that is different from
  your own.'
  I know,
  he'd ask me the six questions of his beginning
   language.
  I'd answer while my daughters' eyes droop
  and his vision grows bigger...
  and when he finally asks me 'Why' I'd say :
  'So that when you're older and in a circle with
   some other boys like you into adolescence;
   When they show you pictures of women clad in an
   air of nudity visible through poring eyes
   and sneer at the woman who is open to her ideas
   and her
   sexuality,
   you'll know to say:
   'I've seen those. My mother has them too.
    And so do all of yours.'

~~ Hemu

                                           Image Source : http://www.chroniclesofanursingmom.com