1984
A Love Poem After The Genocide
A Poem by JASPREET SINGH
The shawl of 1984
is my skin, your skin
So many pores
I would like to rinse
them all
clean
It is very light
the shawl of 1984. Simply
the weight of sixty-million
moist eyelids. The fabric
carries ‘nothingness’
of yellow mustard
fields— vaporized by four-star
generals. It carries a trace of June, when
heat melted cotton and eyes of flying
birds into black-milk. The shawl glitters
with crystals of ashes, raining down still
pretending to be November
Listen, sweet one, the dead may never return
And no one shall claim
the shoes left behind, waiting
near Rajni’s dukhbhanjini. Where you see
the tree of healing, all I see is wreckage
of narrative. A double loss
Our stories, too, were reduced to rubble
And the world listens to the triumphant
perpetrator, who tells the Story
Still, I cannot explain the widening echoes —
Why a near-infinite ardaas
resides in some remote corner of your heart?
Strange web-light
calms and comforts
the wounded pores there
What I love about you (yes, love
still possible
after 84) is the way
you woof
and warp the thread. The way your hands
continue to weave
for the dead. The way you weave
for the little boy with a white knot, For the girl
with two reddened braids
The way you bind taanaa
and taanee and again
and again out of the ruins Harmandar rises
And out of noisy silence
an overdue voice, From now on
No single story
Sweet one, you give me permission, You
hand us all
spinning wheels, portable looms, a set of full
phulkari. And patiently we begin
weaving
re-claiming the gentle flames of our lives
From now on, we will tell
our stories
ourselves
* * * * *
Jaspreet Singh is a novelist, essayist and a short story writer. His latest novel Helium has been called a ‘profound meditation on historical forgetting’.
June 14, 2015
Conversation about this article
1: Ajit Singh Batra (Pennsville, New Jersey, USA), June 14, 2015, 9:39 PM.
With the help of God, we will convey our stories ourselves, assuring that all that comes from our skins is clean and not exaggerated. God is the Tablet, the Pen and the Writer. The world keeps on coming and going but The One is ever new and fresh. [GGS:968] - 'Aapay patee kalam ... navaa niroaa'