Ram Krishna Singh's poem begins in the middle of an argument. "Not that the world I see / is different from the world I dreamt" sounds like a reply to a question we never heard, as if someone had accused the speaker of disillusionment and he is heading it off. Nothing has been betrayed, he says, because he never expected anything better. The second negation, "or I forget that I'm part / of my mother," pushes the idea further. He is not a detached observer. He carries a lineage, and with it a voice, because the mother arrives as a scolding presence, introduced by the poem's only colon.
What she says is compressed and oddly hard to untangle: "in love it's often late / to realize truth through grains / of wheat and petals of blood." Her warning seems to be that love, whether for people or for a place, tends to see clearly only after the damage is done. The two images carry the weight. Wheat suggests the field, the harvest, the daily labour that feeds people. "Petals of blood" fuses a flower with a wound, so beauty and violence become one image. Together they point, judging by the imagery, to a world where land and livelihood are bound up with suffering. The line break after "through grains" leaves the reader briefly holding a handful of seed before the second image lands.
The second stanza turns on a single word, "here." After the family voice of the first stanza, the poem plants itself in a place. The landscape it shows is not passive: "the crooked trees and stones / dictate the length of fire." Trees and stones are normally things that are used or owned, but here they command, and "dictate" carries the sound of authority, even tyranny. "Crooked" is the most interesting word. It describes bent branches, yet it also suggests dishonesty, and it quietly prepares the poem's last word, "scammed." The fire that these witnesses measure has been "not extinguished for ages." The grammar is loose enough that the fire could be literal, or a grievance that has smouldered through generations. The poem lets both readings stand.
Then comes the title, delayed until the fourth line of the stanza: "now awaiting justice." The word "now" matters, because it takes a condition lasting ages and presses it into the present. The sentence also leaves open who is waiting, the fire, the trees and stones, or the people. Justice belongs, in the poem's last phrase, to "the earth and its scammed owners." There is something deliberately deflating in "scammed." After the heightened "petals of blood," it is a flat, modern, almost newspaper word, the vocabulary of fraud rather than tragedy. That clash suggests the injustice is not epic or mythic. It is ordinary, bureaucratic, and a matter of people being cheated out of what is theirs, which may make it harder to bear.
Formally, the poem keeps everything quiet. It is free verse with no rhyme, short lines, lowercase openings, and no full stops at all. Each stanza is a single unfinished-feeling sentence, so the poem never pauses to declare a verdict, and that suits a poem about justice that has not arrived. The sound does some quiet work, though: the long *a* of "late," "grains," "ages" and "awaiting" runs through the poem like a low, held note, and the hard consonants of "crooked trees and stones" make the second stanza sound as rough as the landscape it describes.
The poem's significance lies in how much it holds in twelve lines. It joins the private and the public, a mother's scolding and a land's grievance, without explaining how they connect. It also refuses to shout. The anger is real, but it is carried by images and by one well-chosen, ugly word, and the poem ends not with revenge or reconciliation but with waiting. That leaves readers to decide what they would do in the speaker's place.