These Days All I Can Write About is the Poppies

These Days All I Can Write About is the Poppies

But the bloodstained petals have mothers and husbands

and home addresses that we cannot know;

These days all I can write about is the gravel, which has made

its way to the glass-panelled high rise that lives on, of course, those

Home addresses, far removed from smoke and heat and unborn hatred. A world that

I cannot write these days. To write on such a world is to bear the cost of loving it.

These days all I can write about are mangoes, their soft flesh melting

into the curve of my palm, warm-sweet. I cannot write about what

else is crushed and melts and lives, despite. Who will write about them and

Live to tell their story, only to drown in microphone feedback and

the clicks of a shutter horde as the widemouthed apparition of justice

sells to the widows the notion of a nation. Sharpening like

stakes their stories to sink into the next story-teller caught unaware.

These days all I can write about is the children we have forsaken and

The stories they could have told. Stories for their yet unborn children

years after the ordeal, in comfortable beds on comfortable white tiled

floors. Of story-tellers, and the grey bars that held them once

for the grey truths they told. These days all I can write about

is the flower-paste that turns to poetry

that belongs not to me but to starving hope,

I write, because and despite.

i wore my grandfather’s jacket and found that death is a temporary thing

towards the end he was more mollusc than man. ever so often

he would emerge from the husk of a body that had to be turned over

once in four hours, glassy-eyed and grasping with his throat,

he sought to barter in the currency of his dusted words. his stories

of kolkata in the 1920s, of week-long train rides and the strangers he befriended

that look no different now, than his firstborn son. than the grandchild

whose hand he holds in a death grasp, rattly breath urging me

to listen; no different than the nurse who changes every other week

sleeping at his bedside. transfixed, i watched his ribs crack open to reveal

a stone fruit pith, black and glossy; belonging to a lonesome chikoo

the kind he would bring for us from the market each sunday and

watch, eyes fat like caterpillars, as we bit in innocent ignorance

into the life he had longed for. had i known then what i know now

i would have kissed his covetous heart and placed it gently

there between the blades, beside the mangoes stolen from his

neighbour's yard, bundled it in his pilling red fleece jacket that smells

still like him, like talcum powder and betel nut and agarbattis in an

open socket. the jacket that carried him fetus-like in the belly of a steel beast

into a new world. it is torn in three places from his fall in ‘03. merino wool,

he crowed with vestigial pride. a shell in the broken sand

weathered by years of love that knows no other form than

labour.

a universe in which i am whole

in my mind there is a universe in which i am whole

in which my face is not cradled by lukewarm tears

but my mother’s callused handsand the soft sea breeze

in which my tongue speaks saccharine sweet words

that i truly mean; and my shoulders

do not ache from the hope i carry

to midnight grocery runs; and to the world

there is a universe where my father

is not a result of his father, where

the apple core instead grows

into a great tree and stretches toward

the blazing sun; the woodland creatures inhabiting it

do not go extinct in twenty years, and we

are not closer to dying with

every fleeting moment.

but perhaps that knowledge is

what makes life worth living.

there is a universe in which

the fact that you love me is enough

and we stain our souls not with liquor

but laughter and spring blooms

hold each other like water

with our hearts like open containers.

there is a universe in which

i believe the words i have written

i may never know if that will be

my own.

---

About the Poet:

Sanjana S is twenty and rarely sits with silence for long. She sings often, and without restraint, a quality that tends to find its way into her writing. A student of psychology and political science, she is drawn to the concept of memories, both individual and collective, and how they shape how we move through the world. Her days are loosely organized around cups of chai, brief but meaningful friendships with stray cats, and returning, again and again, to Mehdi Hassan's ghazals. There's nothing she enjoys more, if you couldn't already tell, than an awfully long sentence.