The poem I reached for tonight, 

Has scarred the pages eons ago.

A man stands, neither young nor old,
Hands wrapped in a tangle of barbed wire.
(If now you are thinking of Jesus

And that overwrought tale of nailed silence,

Let me whisper, this is not that story.)

​

Let him step into the light
No need for a DNA test to tell
The face of a forefather gazing across generations.

​

His serene hands, soaked in abrasions,
Numbly imprints red-streaked fingers

​Against the whiteness of a waiting page.

​

One fingerprint follows the other,
The crimson traces start to shape
The blood-stained paper—the truest poem.

​

A smudged scrap at first;

Mistaken for a discarded ballot from another failed republic.

The argument begins—

Nehru’s dream or someone else’s nightmare?

​

The wounds unfold, letter by letter,
A fierce script rises from the silence.
In that exact moment, the poem breathes.

​

It proclaims—
The mother’s nectar flows through our veins.
Fetch the paper, fetch the barbed wire—
Let us rewrite the alphabet with imprints afresh.