Oh, St. Valentine!
Why did you have to die for love?
You could have just let ‘love’ be
And led your life in some obscure monastery
Leaving young ‘birds’ to their roses and carnations
You could have worked your own salvation
Was it a war or a spectacle of hell breaking loose
That stirred your heart into action?
Or did it just melt like butter in a fraction?
Perhaps you remembered the word of Lord
Who created love to create us all
Oh, you must have been horrified to see
Young soldiers bleeding in the battlefields
And young maidens waiting endlessly,
Their veiled heads buried in unending grief,
Did they die aimlessly or to feed the ambition
Of some crazy Claudius, neck-deep in egoism
So blind was the king’s love for war
That he saw no harm in making fodder of them all
‘No young men from now on shall ascend the altar’
While proclaiming this decree, he didn’t falter
A Goth was he, and savage were his ways
Left to himself he’d have ushered in another dark-age
There you came like a shining meteor
Shooting the young hearts with Cupid’s arrows
You sounded the bugle of love, not war
And threw open the doors of the old church
Hustling all the young hearts into a secret grove
You performed their rites in an open defiance
You made it your passion to bless them all
Whoever said ‘yea’ to love and ‘nay’ to war
You only feared the wrath of God supreme
Fear of overlord never made you cruel or mean
Your undying advocacy of love it was
That earned you the ire of famous Claudius
He made yet another proclamation
This time to end all your love-passion
You sang of love even in jail
A jailor’s daughter you didn’t want to fail
Now for Claudius this was too much to bear
He ordered his men to make you a martyr
That spot where you fell to a sacred cause
Your blood turned into hyacinth flowers
Love is no mean thing, after all
Its’ sacrifices are always beyond recall
Oh, St Valentine!
Every time I see your progeny work overtime
To make war of love or love of war
I wonder if you’d return to this earth again,
Shed your blood for consolidating their gain
Some people, I hear, have moved on ahead
And cast your little icons in copper and lead
They mayn’t know who you were, and why you fell
But making a kill is what they know quite well
February 14, they say, is now a Valentine’s Day!
A day for all lovers to offload their hearts
To see if they could give their life another start
Milling crowds of lovers I see all around
Rolling, bending, falling, twisting on a mound
Outbidding each other in a game of upmanship
All this while, I sit alone and wonder
Why they put their wares for sale in a thunder
And only think of love on this singular fair
Their hearts dripping with hatred, rest of the year.
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