The Secret History of Versification

An owl with a broken beak,
and a bone-mourned silence. It
would have been a mistake
to know the names
of the turbulence here – the certitude
with which a soldier fires
towards a crowd, the inevitability
with which a glass bird
is installed
in the middle of the city square,
the raindrops spilling
from its wingspan
illuminating the darkest corners
of a yet unborn child’s mouth –
not to be mistaken as instances of temporary acquittal.

A dawn: flavored
with burnt coal smell
of the roadside clay-oven,
the tealeaves brewing in milk.
The tang of an almost-kitchen.
A famine always smells
like a memory : the recollection
of the fragrance of a pot
of boiling rice. White,
as autumn clouds. How
the odor of a body
stuck in a chair
can flatten a meter’s edges,
how the irrelevance
of a poem can reek.

A thousand fragments and more,
and we both know: there
is nothing that will shackle
my index finger to yours.
A broken genealogy between
us – sans blood-maps,
sans marriages. A rickshaw-puller
crushed to pulp by a squeaky new
car, and the young woman
driving the vehicle, fiddles
with her phone. In another
instance, she will write
in rhymes
the private history
of drapery, as touch –
knowing,
her father’s hands had tied
the stone-pelter
in front of a military-jeep.