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TIME, O GOOD, GOOD TIME, WHERE HAVE YOU GONE?
Another wintry afternoon and evening gone
As eventless and dull
As the brown leaves in a neglected park
Where there is nothing for the kids to play
Or amuse themselves through 'hide-and-seek.'
I walk and walk reminiscing about those days
When life and living were not so taxing
Or jarring on the nerves of myself and my friends
Youthful Talath, mischief-filled B.K. and serious Basit
Pondering Anwar, joking Ahmed Bux and caring Aziz Khan:
How afternoons in Feb at this same place were lively!
As all of us made the park roar with laughter
Along with the kids who used to rest there
While trotting back home from their schools...
I look around and glance yet one more time
At how most of the park has been converted
Into a set-up of small, bee-hive-like apartments
Where the lower class income group government workers live
Or pretend they are living as they have no better option
To lead a better kind of life for themselves and theirfamilies...
Is this what progress means?
I draw out a cigarette and recall Mobarik
And Idrees and Tanveer Anjum who whiled away their spare time
Playing cricket in a vicinity of the same changed venue
The cemented pathway which was used as a pitch by my friends
Is nowhere or at least my gaze has failed me...
If this is what the city builders of this country
Define as progress then I see no hope for those children
Who are under-privileged and cannot go to McDonalds
Kentucky Fried Restaurants, Pizza Huts or Dominoes...
I recall Thomas Gray's famous "Elegy" and ponder
And like him I also prefer to gulp down a tear
While feeling sad at the "short and simple annals of the poor."
I miss all my old colleagues of two decades and more
And the good times we all had during such wintry afternoons
Laughing, cajoling, having a merry time as much as we could...
I also recall William Blake's poem, "The Echoing Green"
And several of Wordsworth's "Lucy Gray" memories...
And then I suddenly think of the girl I loved and lost...
And then, with the same speed of thought, return to the present
To my beloved, rare woman, in the American hills
And these collected thoughts, from the past and the present
Make me sit on the field under a chopped down mulberry tree...
All the change of events that I have chanced to observe
On this listless afternoon of Feb. 11 this year
The "progress" initiated by the civic authorities of the city
Can only be described by my poetic and sensitive mind as destruction
Of the beautiful gifts of nature blessed on us by God...
And it makes me get up and run for a while
Making me feel that my jogging from the destroyed park
Will take me back to those long lost years
When men and women were lovers of natural wonders
And cared more for both: the have and the have-nots...
Nancy Sinatra's song reverberates in my ears as I start running again:
"Time, O good, good time...where did you go?"
(Written and posted by Muhammad Naveed Ahmed/Emmenay on Feb.11, 2011).
