There was a country we could have been
A diamond country, laughing and loved, wonders if its emerald beauty can…
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From ULR
Issue 10 – The Body
It isn’t easy to make a person
The making of a non-person demands wrenched guts, quiet complicity, and a heart unmoved by innocence.
December 17, 2023
It isn’t easy to make a person
non-person. It takes guts
(wrenched out of bellies they worked
so hard to fill). It takes balls
(quietly sat on when they come for the neighbours)
It takes a head full of ideas and a phone
full of contacts who will fetch (petrol, guns,
rope, match boxes, lists of their addresses)
It takes a heart that does not fail
when it sees (that the girl is so young
and the child so trusting, he would stop
crying now if only you would stop).
📖
PART OF A COLLECTIONIt isn’t easy to make a person and 2 other poems
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Annie Zaidi
Annie Zaidi is the author of Gulab, Love Stories # 1–14, and Known Turf: Bantering with Bandits and Other True Tales which was shortlisted for the Crossword Book Prize (non-fiction). She is the editor of Unbound: 2,000 Years of Indian Women’s Writing. She won The Hindu Playwright Award in 2018 for her play Untitled 1 and the Nine Dots prize in 2019 for her essay ‘Bread, Cement, Cactus’. Her novel Prelude to a Riot won the TATA Literature Live! Book of the Year Award—Fiction in 2020.