Decomposition By: Zulfikar Ghose

DECOMPOSITION

Zulfikar Ghose

I have a picture I took in Bombay

of a beggar asleep on the pavement:

grey-haired, wearing shorts and a dirty shirt,

his shadow thrown aside like a blanket.

His arms and legs could be cracks in the stone,

routes for the ants' journeys, the flies' descents,

Brain-washed by the sun into exhaustion,

he lies veined into stone, a fossil man.

Behind him there is a crowd passingly

bemused by a pavement trickster and quite

indifferent to this very common sight

of an old man asleep on the pavement.

I thought it then a good composition

and glibly called it "The Man in the Street,"

remarking how typical it was of

India that the man in the street lived there.

His head in the posture of one weeping

into a pillow chides me now for my

presumption at attempting to compose

art of his hunger and solitude.

This poem really opened my eyes and it has taught me allot, the most important of which is that we should never allow ourselves to become callous and immune to the suffering of others. Zulfikar took the photograph, examined it and then he noticed what pain and distress the elderly beggar was going through. He teaches us that we should NOTICE things before we can change them. We cannot fight poverty before we notice that there is poverty. Everybody deserves to be treated with respect.

"Decomposition" in a little bit more detail.

 Decomposition is a first person narrated poem written by Zulfikar Ghose. Decomposition tells us about Ghose's personal experience of a photograph that he had taken. The photograph is f a beggar in the streets of Bombay, India. 

"...of a beggar asleep on the pavement: grey-haired, wearing shorts and a dirty shirt..." this sentence indicates that poverty is present in the beggars life.

• The word "shadow" in the 4th line is a simile for a blanket which lets the reader believes the beggar lives on the street.

• "cracks in the stone" means that the beggar is part of the pavement because of how his body is so thin that it just looks like lines in the ground.

• "routes for the ants' journeys, the flies' descents" shows us that the beggar is unimportant because of how the flies and ants just journey over him.

 Ghose mentions how people just walk on by him and show no interest in helping the man. It says how they are “bemused” by the beggar showing confusion, like it is not normal for poverty to be present. It makes the reader believe that people are not comfortable seeing people without money.

• Ghose tells us at the end how he feels guilty abut making art out of somebody else’s pain and suffering. This brings realization to the reader that instead of looking at someone and finding amusement out of them being lower class we should rather think about ways to help that person and act on our thought.