The Enfield

This is a poem about India's first war of independence against the British, but it's also about the rebels in all of us. 

For more information, check out www.indialife.com/History/1857_revolt.htm

TO LOAD

STEP 1: Bite the cartridge
STEP 2: Pour the gunpowder into the rifle
STEP 3: Stuff the cartridge case
STEP 4: Load
STEP 5: Aim
STEP 6: Fire

Those are the steps.  Follow those steps. 

Bite.Pour.Load.Aim.Fire.
Bite.Pour.Load.Aim.Fire.
Bite…

Pork and beef were not the main dishes. 
They bit hard into the over-sized bellies of their captors,
Fattened with seeds from the pillaged soils

They bit hard to put a hole through which all the plundering could fall out
And behold the wealth that spilled forth, cum-drenched,
those white rivulets stained with blood-red rubies, fiery orange harvest, crimson-coloured riches...

Monies

Fire.

The bullet's trajectory triggering resistance like the pinball wizard.
From east to west, the chewing away of excess became ravenous.
But it did not stop there. 
It went through the glass ceiling…

Piercing the heavy air of freedom-fried complacency
The fires that go on raging from the mountains to the deserts,
The detonators that go off in our restless hearts,

These hearts that can not sit in silence,
We feel the agony when we bite the bullet of our identities,
The revolutionaries, their anguish gone from all those centuries of just saying NO

So when the bullet punctures a hole in our modern-day traps,
Those traps that remove us from our radical struggles,
Imprisoning us in brightly-coloured idealistic bubbles,
We must take a step back to the torched villages when fear had no place in the hearts of the conquered, but consumed the greed of the conquerors.

Bite.Pour.Load.Aim.

Fire.

By Shaz