/My what-if's are a sea that stinks of drowned courage./
At seventeen, baba tore ninety-seven of my poems. "They are rebellious," he said. But my poems, my poems were about a child who sits amidst sixty odd brains and thinks Hitler wasn't as bad a human. My poems talk about streets whose lanes are stained red. My poems are a eulogy to mankind, they question amma's bruises. They talk about cheese and butter, gunpowder and closed shutter. My poems are rebellious. Baba said, my poems are rebellious so I dare not write the next one, or the next one, or the next to next one.
I see a man facing a lavender bush at six in the evening. His eyes are a wrath, his skin is buried inches below intolerance. His pen wriggles on paper, the way prejudice wriggles around my lungs like rotten phlegm. He writes till six in the morning and the sun wept that day. The newspapers yell, the nation awakens. This poem hits the streets like a mid-day fog and there are no casualties. This poem is the ninety eighth rebel. But you see, I never wrote the next poem. Or the next. Or the next.
by Namira Wasim ( https://www.instagram.com/namira_wasim/?hl=en )
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