What are words?
Twisted lipmarks upon wind
Fractured, fractalled orchids of the mind
That strange, shadow-illumined place.
What are words? What good?
What good the blue dance of light
In the Kreutzer, as Perlmann's fingers shape it?
What good the vanishing arc of sun over the western sea?
What good the smell of tea, the tinkling chords of spoon
Upon porcelain? What good, what good?
What good the endless evenings of aloneness
What good the search for a permanent address
In city after city, in the mind's wilderness?
What good the debates over Foucault, What good
Swiss chocolates, what good glenfiddich?
What good Prithvi and Nandan? Passolini? What good?
When this terrible ecstasy breathes its vapours into
The fabric of the evening, and joins the dots
Of absence in the sky:
Karbaala, Jerusalem, New York, Delhi, London, Mumbai, Mumbai...
Howl howl howl howl howl
Amidst the bitter waters of this evening of silence,
Amidst this litany of loss,
Amidst this perverse ceremony of bewilderment
This frayed ritual of forced forgetting, in endless encores
Howl howl howl howl howl
The fables of memory
Stifled in the throats of the
Ghosts that whirl in the dustspecks
Amongst dawnlances of sun, in
The planar intersections
Of the city beneath whose skin
All the shadow cities of the mind
Have taken root
Howl howl howl howl howl
Out dreams from the
Throats of a thousand lost
Generations, smear them upon the sky
For we, pale, dream-forged beings,
Spasms of light in this weary universe-
We are made and unmade by love.
In response to the act of terror in Mumbai on July, 11th. First published here on the Writers Against Terrorism blog. I'd urge all the writers here to contribute to it, or at least read and reflect, because impalpable things as they are, we are defined by words, and by words we define reality, and so to speak, or even to read, is an act of protest in itself.
