Blood-thin light, this night
Losing
sleep to the
silence of your
footsteps, I wonder if no
news is good news after all. The
crackle of our sapphire love ignited,
your thoughts, an exile in this
riverbed running across my skin, keeping
warm the nights of wrong. Red is red the
colour of blood the colour of being loved
so fiercely, you lose yourself to longing.
Red is red the colour of a bridal saree
the colour of a people warring
the colour of being too
close to the sun.
Son, red was the rain that nourished our crops in that enflamed August fall.
Red was the badge your father wore and kissed them goodbye. Alvida. Salam.
Partition. Annihilation. Loaded words, tanks with death-cold
snouts, metal tuskers throwing carelessly about
orbuculums of disaster. One moment you're sipping tea,
the next you're dead. Do they speak a language
that's ours? Do we eat food off their plates?
Is my cloth cut from their yarn?
Do we look just the same?
Chew their jasmine,
call out my name! Same enough?
Enough
blood speaking
before tongue. Weep
and thou shall be shot.
Perhaps children bloom on devil's
rot. Martyrs on both sides of land. A
map, a man, a mat, wipe loose history's
dirt before you enter. Skies clanging on both
sides, a lone tree centred. On both sides,
a river. A river, my veins of steel.
Heal, must heal. When it rains, it doesn't
discriminate. When it rains red, it glues
together fates. What shall we do of bones
collected in the process? Where do flesh-
torn petals go? Before autumn,
a bloodied winter. After dawn,
a hushed breeze of
mourning.
These graves, these remains, this crimson-
stained fawning.
This blood. Ours.
This skin. Ours.
These wounds. Ours.
These hands. Ours.
These guns. Theirs.
Who they?
Ours.
Shefali Banerji is a poet from Kolkata, India, currently based in Dublin, Ireland. A Ph.D. candidate at Trinity College Dublin's School of English, Shefali's poems can be found in The Bombay Review, Open Minds Quarterly, Rigorous Magazine, Snapdragon Journal, and elsewhere.