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Poetry

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'

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