Borders in My Backyard

My mind is a graveyard where voices go to sleep.

How do I tell you I am barren today?
If satisfaction was not bought with a few clicks,
I would have sailed too, like Odyssey and spit on his grave,
named myself the only Queen of Ithaca.

Haven’t I travelled to worlds far beyond?
Haven’t I seen God in person, chained hands,
dragged through obscure muddied city roads
that you will never know on a cozy winter afternoon?

I have sat at the same board as you,
drank from the same bowl of brew that has gone cold,
and with a spoon measured the number of joys
fracturing our days, yet your eyes see a different dawn
and mine see none.

I have sewn myself shut in pages after pages,
and begged for the holy sight,
ran naked on the bank of Ganges,
river drying, river dying.
My thirst has burnt a hole in my tract.

Now, I too shine dead
like a fish scale glaring at the sky.
I lie under your sky, the mass of flesh tangled
like sheets left to dry in the sun
by a callous washerwoman who may never return.

Shame on her neglectful hand
that will not touch me, spread me…
Or ask me;
how I am, what my name is, why am I here?

What is this country to me?

You have passed me, past the streets,
you have buried your puny head
inside my womb a thousand times,
yet you do not stop before me,
or ask me;
how I am, what my name is, why am I here?

What is this country to me?

Your eyes see different dawn,
mine see the pale faces of the children
trapped in borders.
I do not know how to spell or speak.
I do not know how to ask or answer.

How am I?
What my name is?
Why I am here?

I ask the fire to burn me.
In my burnt, ashy voice, I will speak of tongues
that you have never spoken in,
of borders you have never crossed,
of places you have never been to.
In my burnt, ashy voice,
I will call myself Queen.

Utterly borderless, I will call myself free.

For Azaadi, for refugees, for the displaced diaspora.

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