Category: Resistance Poetry

I and my sister
were taught to walk on a
bridge
between prayer rugs scraping knees
and my nani’s hand circling incense sticks
bridge…

In his suitcase
Ittar bottles catch their eye:
‘No Alcohol.’
They sniff
The exotic fragrances
And stare
Into the traveler’s eyes…

The sky mourns at the roof of my mouth.
I want you
but the sea more.
Stained lens of our ancient camera, look!
Shadows dissolve in the
walls of incongruent grief,
none captured…

Bhumi sent me many things
Toffee, slate pencil, kittens
So I wired some money
To her core
Which didn’t reach,
But a tumbler of steel, bobbed
Up and down
From primordial well
Into that abyss of metal…

It’s the taste of an aftermath. The tang of lime soaked in ashes. A flavour that’s unrealized, an overdose of hot afternoon, grief with hands of a gravedigger, gumboots in a coal mine, cigarettes’ butt, an infant ‘s shrill whine, the silence of a fluttering butterfly, the abandonment of love but not hope…

I pluck sadness out of me
and plant it into the earth of His heart.
I don’t wish to find it hovering above
in the eagle circling in the thermals
or the sun’s mystifying halo…

What else? Ghee, puffed wheat,
semolina, cigarettes, 200 cartridges,
spare hookah pipes, rifle-cleaning cloth,
malted Horlicks, Tiffin tins
a little stained by blood and mud. What else…