Man is infatuated with his creative power, superb vision,
His inventive genius, his deep insight of how things should be.
He is all the while engaged in correcting God’s mistakes.
Critical and convinced of His incompetence,
He has dismissed Him as a stupid counselor,
A bad ill-trained Manager, unworthy of any trust or faith.
If there is a God, He is simply powerless, gone senile with age.
He has no control over his creation, the runaway satellite.
Men are busy in labs, factories, universities, in religion and politics,
On land, sea and air to make up for His inefficiency,
Repair His innumerable false moves, bad judgement.
God is an opium for the illiterate, a drug for the poor.
No right thinking man must pronounce His name,
This age-old superstition still kept alive in crumbling temples,
Out-dated convents and monasteries, holy places,
Will die a natural death in this luminous era
Of man’s conquest of land, sea and the outer space.
Even if there is a God, why should He be concerned at all
With this tiny dot, a flying short-lived spark, a speck of dust
In the measureless immensity of the Space around us.
The universe is like a self-winding watch, just moves on.
We must make the earth safe for our children and their children.
The problem of death is a murky question for the present,
We will prolong life with a pig’s heart, kidneys from the monkeys.
Someone is quietly chuckling : man is just Nature’s aborted attempt.
A new species, God-possessed children, a new race is growing.
They may be even some members of your family, a little queer,
Psychologically unbalanced, misfits, irreparable fools
Suffocating, imprisoned in a dark cell
Yearning for the auspicious sign of the final deliverance,
The miracle shattering the walls around their souls,
And who dote on an invisible Friend illuminating their days,
On a new light, on a new world of divine harmony
Destroying all falsehood and fostering the divinity in men.
Niranjan Guha Roy 1997
