Teesta Review: A Journal of Poetry, Volume 6, Number 1. May 2023. ISSN: 2581-7094
What is Peace?
--- Urna Bose
The shower of red blood cells – confetti-tossed.
Remembrance, an unsharpened lead pencil,
carries the weight of a folded train ticket –
a ride never taken, never will get taken.
A howl is a sweet-nothing turned inside out.
An eyeball yanked out of a socket
drunk on a lieutenant’s pledge, looks away.
Public memory is a rhetorical question.
A generational nightmare turns a rogue elephant and
drinks from a deep-tissue well of trauma.
The memory of a missile – sulphuric acid on the
tongue.
A trench hoarse with a patriotic hangover
neatly sliced into the all-important morning
bulletin.
Adrenaline-thumping jingoism rides a high horse.
War reparations sweet talk their way into the
annals.
In the future, historians to dutifully prettify
the inconsolable, while the unspeakable
is ordained into muteness and the smoke rings of
conscience crammed in, neatly wedged
between pride and patriotism.
In a classified BBC report, a parliamentarian is
quoted, “I’m not naming names”.
A 6-year-old child trudges up a hill in a threadbare,
light blue dress - a rag doll - straws hanging out.
She will never go to school, though she
doesn’t know that yet.
Her bony fingers let loose a question,
she throws it up at the birdless sky. The question,
on the bed of ether, alters into a weeping flower.
Where was God the day Daddy became a thousand pieces?
Self-Preservation
--- Urna Bose
Silence, I don’t know
what to make of it,
an epiphany borrowed
from James Joyce
wrapped in papery
dragonfly wings,
unphotographed, not a
consumerist slave to an
eager-beaver smartphone
camera, sans the chronic
ache for social media
validation – the hollow
husk of a pupa.
Bottle it up carefully,
and leave it out in the Sun
– kachchi
kairi ka achaar, the tangy memento
of a late spring
handing over the baton
to summer, at first
glance a burdened pharaoh ant,
sit with it all
afternoon then, the wordlessness –
a freckle of peace, and
the tranquilizing whirring of the ceiling fan.
* Kachchi
kairi ka achaar – raw mango pickle
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