Content Warning: blood, violence, death
Rashika Desai - Two Poems
Stab
In this land of fear, only—
a rusted swing set,
a languishing overgrown vine,
a knife at its roots,
gloves that grasp it,
armoured over fingers,
tainted by the saffron
from the blood
on their hands.
Kneel
This land, once the home
of depths and vines and ruins and echoes,
is now slave to fences.
With folded knees and open ears pressed
to the soil, you could once hear murmurs
of the far-off sea and the stories it whispered
of itself. In these shifting tales, the sea
widened and filled up spaces and erupted lands
from land. It manned the ends of earths
peopled by borders.
These grounds, once the homes
of depths and vines and ruins and echoes,
are now only grains.
Pressing ears to soils only reveals hums
of far-off drills searching for oil; screams
of the dead once killed
for walking barefoot
on the mud,
for daring to kneel to rivers
and not gods.
Photograph: Riverbanks by Jacelyn
Jacelyn (she/her) recently started focusing on her art proper, having persevered through an engineering major and a short stint as a civil servant. Her artworks have appeared in adda and Sine Theta Magazine. She can be found at https://jacelyn.myportfolio.com/ and on Instagram at @jacelyn.makes.stuff