Читать книгу Time and love. The novel in verse - George Pospelow - Страница 57
Part I
Indian spring
May
Hunger time in Bengal
ОглавлениеThree million people
died of hunger in Bengal33.
Families, villages died.
Human woe during
hunger and cholera time
was beyond all measure…
jackals, vultures,
dogs become wild
gnawed out
pieces of meat
from the bodies
of dying people,
swollen corpses on the streets,
corpses drift along the river…
In the hope of surviving,
people tried to get
to Calcutta.
Having had reached
the city they quit
this world there,
could not beg anybody
for a tiny bit of rice,
praying eyes grow dim…
No lament,
howl…
33
I heard about that disaster – and, names, places – in the village where countrymen looked as if not recovered even thirty years later – small walking skin covered skeletons. Bengal had rice from adjacent Burma. After the Japanese’s seizure in 1942, the supplies stopped, and a crop failure broke out at home
