Poetry
Exposure
Bhopal
1984
A Poem by JASPREET SINGH
Night shift:
He separates smells with ease
Dust of pesticide enfolds him
like ivories
Entangled in Carbide's empire
my son, the mechanic, labors on
Outside on famished footpath
groundnut fire keeps me warm,
I, the night watchman, I
wait for sound of siren
to bring my son back from harm
Hush!
Methylisocyanide
It leaked...
Do I know?
I only know it leaked
And dwarfed me in odor
pungent with carrion spit, rat shit, wild onion
Swelled my eyes with offensive vision
I cannot imagine my son
diminishing
in lines of perverse production
Hush...
This must be dark kalyug:
Naked substance zigzags my city
out of Warren Anderson’s gas
chambers. Atoms rise
to roam the bazaars in turned-out toes, and
baric blue nipples
Invisible clouds kiss cartography, grasshoppers, pages of Gita,
but clot earth's inherited laughter
Gas reddens in the throats of crowds, screams,
holds its braids by the aching gamin
There it mixes its own breath
in the breath of half-living lungs,
discolors soles, disfigures wombs, mutates shadows
Here it pierces a chemist's tongue,
desecrates human sorrows
Still unsatisfied
it boards dizzy trains
Shawled in a run-away reaction
chokes another ninety-thousand
then clears off unquestioned
Soon I'll cremate his cyanide eyes, my son's long
hydrocarbon remains, Soon
(in a poison beautiful world)
the un-renewable
human song
Jaspreet Singh’s latest book “Helium” is published by Bloomsbury.
December 3, 2014