jasmine volksgeist

By Bilal Choudhry

listening to the echoes 

of the Railway, a sight 

that the crimson pool had filled. 

veins of heritage and millennia of words 

severed, each bloodstream trickling its own purported legacy. 

by the echoes of the slaughter, 

the unwavering indignant waves of lies 

live, 

fueling the heat wave that moves 

with the steel wheels and iron-clad cabins 

its passengers bask 

under the shades of moulsari 

and bloom under the auspices 

of Jinnah, 

the incantations, hymns, lettered sorceries 

of Iqbal, 

and the guidances, enlightenments, pedagogics of Nehru. 

but what is a pure country 

whose people aren’t people? 

the establishment 

of a nation-state that has everything 

but the narratives of its yearning masses. 

— — — 

again, august 14th and july 4th come, 

with their echoes of echoes— 

a mise en abyme of trauma 

laden with horrors of plagues, 

executions, 

and bittersweet tastes of black cherries and falsas.

— — — 

in Coney Island, there’s a hall

old-fashioned, post-modernly? 

with frescoes of unspoken tales, chipping away yearly. 

the gray-haired sits on the cemented staircase, looking mindlessly 

but her voice recounts the vermillion horizon of her stillborn, looted past.