Artwork by Ilona Yousuf. Image Courtesy ArtChowk Gallery
A refugee from Belief seeks a cell tonight.
~ Agha Shahid Ali
when, in 1992, they came
knocking at the door, I could hear
you hide her in the bedroom,
in the mirror-worked quilts—
with their white stitching
running crisscross
across the patches she’d sewn
—she had tucked you into
when you were a child
—we had all slept in them sometime—
so often that their threads were coming loose
from the corners, like the door-frame
that held it all together, fraying
with those knocks which were growing
into thunder—you were praying
for the first time
if I could say it like that, I’d have traded
places, offered you your own womb,
from where I peered as you blanketed
your mother, as your father wept for being
safe, only because he had this name
he didn’t choose to take; it isn’t easy to unstitch
our names, or to drown them
in that ganga-jamni
the goons’ grandchildren now cry in slogans,
as they conceal their grandfathers’ swords
between their teeth and through their tongues,
decked up with saffron and tinsel made from certain
names and certain quilts whose stitches
gave them away;
like they will at the door? now
again, with their inked fingers
—those blots will always look like swords—
I am imagining things, as you say,
as I imagined from inside
your belly the world ringing against
the door-frame you were too swollen
to hold up with your own weight, or the days
you spent in silence watching the door
that—somehow—never fell,
or the quilt that never gave—
shall I wear it on my head?
~ Poorna Swami
Poorna Swami is a writer, choreographer, and dancer currently based in New York City. Originally from Bangalore, India, she is Editor-at-Large, India for Asymptote. Her poetry is forthcoming in Indiana Review.
