The Idea of Mankind

Mankind was always an idea and men have toyed with the idea
of seeing themselves as more than mere men,
With plain desires such as salad, dessert and a cup of tea;
Did men exist as “men” before the invention of mankind,
is a question I am not qualified to answer,
Less so because I am a man,
More so because I embody traits that reflect mankind,
It must be written somewhere that
I pay the price for being born man,
I paid it in a way that is expected of mankind;
It is not about being grammatically or politically correct,
Mankind is a little more than that as are men in general,
If zero is the condition of being,
(don’t forget that the dinosaurs thrived
For 135 million years before they became extinct)
Then mankind is a post-zero thing and there is no evidence,
To state that it is not doomed to extinction some day or the other;
Men will come into this world,
who will reject the idea of manhood,
With a death-like passion,
They, too, will pay the terrible price of being born into
a man-made world: St. Francis and Pasolini,
The idea of mankind is a dangerous thing,
that it is a word and, like all words innocent,
Does not free it of thousands of bloody years of persecution,
and the plague of war
The morally degenerate have created in the obsession,
to preserve a particular order at the expense of others.

Prakash Kona teaches in the Department of English Literature at The English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU), Hyderabad. His areas of interest include: Anarchism, Avant-garde poetry, Third World Resistance Writing, Autobiography, Peasant cultures, Anti-state politics, Debates on violence and extremism, Working-class and marginalized subcultures, Revolutionary art forms, and Mass-centered movements.

https://www.pambazuka.org/author/prakash-kona https://www.eurasiareview.com/author/prakash-kona/ https://efluniversity.academia.edu/PrakashKona