‘there are no poems’

(a tribute to the poetry of Alok Dhanwa)

there are no poems for
the mother who didn’t
have her stomach
sutured after
they extracted her unborn
tumour,
afraid she would birth
yet another fragile small mouth, filled
with a thousand
sharp-edged questions that
might erupt
like puzzled saplings through the
blood-soaked earth,
quite like the three who came before
her, and now lie rotting
in the same masculine mud.

there are no poems for
her who,
had she lived,
would have whiplashed endless
‘why’s
with her furious tongueless mouth,
her circumcised soul
the size of a curse that
a species cannot endure.

there are no poems about
the slithering fear
they carry coiled inside their
military hearts;
fear with forked tongues,
forked as forceps
that extract any and all
future ‘why’s
that may dare to doubt
the absence of poems in this land.

there are poems though, written
in prisons
about good men in cages
quietly living out
unjust sentences,
as if forbearance were
Man’s greatest virtue,
no matter how many others
beyond those cages –
imprisoned in
skins whose shades start wars –
were made to snag
on battle-tank chains,
torn to abstractions, their
histories littering the gutters outside
those prison walls like the shadows
of untrod snakes.

there are no poems though
about those men who
chose instead to
blow up prison walls.

poems, although much longer,
are wishless before bullets;
a poem may pierce, but cannot kill;
poems can stand silently
like rifles in corners;
like their shadows;
like their cold long iron penises
which spray angry hate into
the women they kill
when their bullets run out;
like the dead wood in their butts
that once throbbed with moss
and arched to greet
the first rain
but have now been polished to a place
where no trace of life can
taint them.

poems can stand silently
but do not wish to.

my poem would like to greet you
the way a furious matchstick
greets a river of oil.

there are no poems for fires
started this way.

but if there happen to be one or two
they will have leapt
into their own fires unwilling
to outlast them.

there are no poems that stand
as shrines to the self-immolated;
words dream of being embers,
not ash.

i carry your poem
in my hand
it was carved here like a road
it was to take us somewhere

i carry your poem
on my shoulders
like her father would have
that little girl
had she been birthed

i carry your poem
around my neck.
my chest is words
read by those who understand my tongue.
i met one who didn’t.
she stared at me with fear.
our skins were not the same shade.
i felt the urge to reach for a knife then
since she would never allow me to
kill her with your poem.

there was a poem i
wrote once that
stood defiant
before an atomic sorrow.

i waited
for one of the two to explode,
hoping to go down with it;
but instead yet
another unsuspecting
geographical boundary somewhere
shivered, and changed shape,
including a new poem on one side,
excluding a familiar one on the other.

there are no poems
for those who cease to belong
when boundaries change
this way.