ONE YEAR
I tried to write about Gaza I thought up great metaphors Blood ink in the nib of a pen The rubble crying to the heavens For Jesus to give them life once more Figures that if yelled loudly enough May pass the fingers stuffed in the ears I tried to write about Gaza All I saw was a great grey chasm A dark void before my heart.
I tried to praise the faith of Gazans
Pray for the piles of small-sized shoes
I tried to make sense of Auschwitz
I lined up the corpses, four to a stanza
I made them recite from the Quran
Sitting atop the living with my pen, counting
The house-slave begging the master for mercy
In front of whips he would never feel on his back
I thought about how Srebrenica made me feel
I quoted my favourite philosophers.
Allah forgive our stupidity and cowardice
Praying and crying over conquered graves
Asking Allah to send mercy, not rockets and mines
Chanting our silly spells calling for war's end
When Satan fears the barrel of a gun.
ON INKTOBER 2024: I did not do an Inktober this year. Since last Inktober, lakhs of people have been wiped out wholesale while the world watched on, and did nothing. I refuse to stoop down to describing how each life is precious or a comparison to Indian Independence - if you are an idiot, you are an idiot - and I just could not write anything that would be appropriate for this time. Imagine writing about goddamn backpacks in this time. Not to mention, when you are seeing children completely annihilated en masse, you really are not in a position to write shit. So, I wrote a poem about Palestine. This was done listening to Homayoun Shajarian’s “Aan Dilbare Man”, but I am not going to upload it in the story, and I am not going to use hashtags. I cannot praise certain people on this site, so I will instead praise the Green Party USA, who hopefully will deny the 21st century Adolph at least one state this November. Salam.
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