Poetry
Love & Hate: A 9.11 Cocktail
A Poem by NINA CHANPREET SINGH
I hate my love handles
You hijack a plane
A suicide murder
Balbir Singh Sodhi shot in the back of the head
A 5 year old boy with a patka punched in the face kicked to the ground
crushed rib cage his Heart broken open
What harvest will this yield future generations?
Hate breeds hate from the same seed on American soil
self hate/muslim hate/sikh hate
What makes an act of terrorism any different
from your news reporting profiling turbans with brown skin?
from go back home?
from you hating me, hating yourself, hating myself?
If I fill my heart with love
tell you I love you
will that make you stop?
Or will you only see
brown skin long braid widow’s peak steel bracelet?
What about
Ik Onkar etched into my heart
hair covering my body
self acceptance?
Go back home.
Where is my home?
Punjab, my mother
America,
my birth place
already destroyed
Ripped apart
flames of hate
bleeding rivers
How do planes explode towers?
How many times can you recite the mool mantr in a minute?
How many seconds in a minute?
How many people died at the count of death?
How many people died that you forgot to count?
How many unborn generations live inside of us, already dead?
Nina Chanpreet Singh, M.S.Ed. is a writer, educator and consultant. She is the Founder of Kitchen Table Kids which teaches children intercultural and social emotional skills in cooking classes inspired by Guru Nanak's Langar Kitchen. Her recipe/memoir was recently published in the NY Times bestselling cookbook by Molly O’Neill, One Big Table. She writes, speaks, teaches and consults about a variety of topics related to human development today, ranging from bhangra dance and cultural identity to food history and public health to education and technology.
September 11, 2011
Conversation about this article
1: Baldev Singh (Bradford, United Kingdom), September 11, 2011, 10:42 AM.
Beautiful poetry!
2: Harinder (Uttar Pradesh, India), September 11, 2011, 11:07 AM.
For Sikhs, the scars of 1947 have healed and 1984 has begun to heal. For Americans, 9.11 too will heal with time. After they have gone through their rounds of revenge and blood-letting.
3: K.B. Singh (U.S.A.), September 11, 2011, 11:39 AM.
Amazing!
4: Ramneet kaur (Atlanta, Georgia, USA), July 05, 2012, 4:21 AM.
It is a wonderful piece of art and I love it as it is describing the present day scenario of hate and crime and it is also trying to mitigate the situation through Guru Nanak's message of Ik Oankar.