Elegy For Shaheen Bagh

Winter. Gale dressed as a spitfire lodged in the back of a widow’s throat.

The land splitting into a beautiful kind of wreckage--sons choking on their

lineage. Boys ripped from their mother’s yielding wombs, faulted genesis--
how the storm clouds scatter, mucus lathering pastel in oxidised shadow-spun / skin.

Here, the people are moulded from the soil of nativity, their landbearers tracing
crosshatches over vertebrae, shelling empty husks of a future hung in the between.

In Park Circus, a butterfly wraps itself in cellophane. Metamorphosis wedged

in polymer, threads unravelling into seven crossings, larvae exhumed in the falling dusk.

An infant scalds her tongue on the railway guard’s tea, cutting her rising babble
into the porchlight, the seal on a broken comrade’s last letter home. Gargled residue

on a wall for the honourable. Resistance in shades of vermillion. Iron-clad, a dozen

paper boats sputter into life, trailing the afflictions of a patriot struck too close

to the bone. In livelihood, adaptation. Revolution in shattered ink bottles, quills

steeped in the feathers of a bird who traded its song for a bouquet of lotuses, their

stems spelling out freedom. Festivity, the bitter edges of light churning out a shopman’s
butter from two yokes, split down the middle. Refusal. A poet cries out, his tongue

lisping at letters arching towards the street. Flare-signal on a shoreline. Scholars throwing their
manuscripts into the ether, khaki burning in the shadow of a gift horse, bleeding anarchy.

Spring. Hail dressed as a maiden’s funeral candle, lengthening into congested starlight.
The land blossoming into a pre-summer slumber. Pollen tearing out of the magnolias--

daughters choking on their heritage.