Poem: "1947"

by Nikita Bhardwaj

my grandmother’s fingers are coarse as she braids my hair,
humming stories in a language my tongue rejects.
we sit cross-legged on the shingled roof my great-grandfather
raised, suspended in salty sweat and ground turmeric.
from here, puddles bleed gold into burnt soil, and a drooping
sapphire skyline ripples across the Himalayas. I feel my
grandmother’s palms tremble - the gnarled rivers
winding down her hands ran red years ago, she tells me,
back when bullet holes forged the moon and its star.

***

damp from monsoon rains,
dirt clings to the soles of her feet.
the wind is bitter, biting,
and the trains’ rumbles remind her of
crashing tempests, of home.

she journeyed many miles to this station;
now dusk kisses the spaces beneath her eyes,
as she awaits her brother, who spent the last
six months bleeding radio static across the border.

her whispered prayers rise and
fly north with the vultures,
to feast on decaying dreams and
crumbling corpses of resilience.

as the red sun weeps across the railway,
a sinister whistle shakes heavy air.

cadavers flop out of carriages,
severed arms grasping skyward
for stars long extinguished. she wades through a
green sea of blood and dust, in futile search
of the man wearing a black cap and a waning crescent
grin. the dried tear tracks hastily smeared
across her face
spell out the inexorable message of war

***

eyes dark with the shadows of countless restless nights, my
grandmother smooths my tears into lotus petals.
as rain strikes against sun stained skin, and thunder clouds
coil along blurred purple mountains, I watch grandmother shake,
watch her frail shoulders tremble under the weight of a cloudburst.
does she hear her brother’s silvery voice in the
distant calls of songbirds? see his face in the cornfields,
parted by ravaging gales? softly, wordlessly, I shift
my back to the wind, sink my fingernails into
the corners of the universe, and pray that the sky
doesn’t swallow my great grandfather's house.

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