poetry by Kalika Sen
Image by NON GRATA, from the performance at Grace Exhibition Space, Sept 2022
Everything eaten
will answer your crimes.
This summer outside
the city smells of hay.
What am I to do with her traitors and knowledge of history?
I used to think courage and love were the same.
Along the roads are the buried.
It is hard to trample this good solid earth
and not think of them.
Small humans make more sense than the big ones.
Every day is an ellipsis.
There’s an enormous chorus in the head that won’t stop.
They are singing of the great mysteries.
Your decadence drowns out the beauty.
Our horror is one step,
then the next, onwards,
one step, one step, one step.
A girlish braid round her skull,
like a crown of surprise,
she is ordinary and afraid to hold a rifle.
She carries a baby wrapped in rags silent
descending into the basement of some ruins.
The whole area, pile of rubble
in my dream I lead her to safety:
She sees a soldier swallowing a line of silver bullets
miniature river shimmering in the moonlight
he only has one left and we know it could ultimately save him
faint smile on his face blows up turning the basement into a boat
the survivors arrive to a small riverbank side city
the girl now a boy is safe there
so the others can continue their ragged journey
some mothers decided it best
to drown their daughters both after and before
even the ones who begged them
saying they wouldn’t cry.
I never did like great ideas.
Great heroes.
Great History chains us
to the deepest vilest hunger post.
A heifer burns in the night circling its own
charred burden in a red moon in a barren flat field.
How can anyone live in this?
The old tell me to leave their souls
and write of their decorations, certificates, houses, children.
The bronzed hero caught the pickpocket,
took his arm on his knee and snapped it.
All gallantry is now clay mixed
with sand and a rich dress in a coffin.
We’re all missing in action when war happens.
What buries the dead in white linen?
It’s hard to kill a human being.
Trust me.
Don’t live to learn the truth
but sure, killing’s harder than dying.
I did both.
I woke up to a dizzy glimmers of youtube
Indian news channel covering
the axis meeting
Russia-Iran-China
praising the achievements of the liberators
The Great Mother Russia
as a dark goddess
played by an army of dead souls
that amazing institution, the Russian novel
enacted on the screen by Putin, Raisi, and Erdogan
she needs sacrifice
they need sacrifice
blood of Syria was just a sip
from black sea to red sea
boats loaded with corpses
do ut des
exchange of gifts between the gods and the men
the entrails of children are used
by the magicians of geopolitics
to foresee the future
famines droughts storms
life goes on
upstate summer of art
freedom of free people
celebrated freely
the Ukranians aren’s impressed by those Russian ballerinas
Wagner’s symphony playing out by the atylery
striking cords of the post-Soviet society
where violence and death just don’t have much meaning
so the war’s fiddle goes on
So does life in New York
swallowing large amounts of jazz, mostly pianos
trumpets, saxofones, drums
endlessly scrolling kittens hashtags
catching up with that life of the western world
unbothered
by artillery
meeting of the axis
war dreams
war cuddles
