Exile is not a Foreign Word

To understand exile, you don’t have to look
further than the family down the street
who lost their home and all they owned,
including their pets, in a fire, or a foreclosure,
or the mass of people reaching their arms out
to rescuers who pull them out of the water
in the sudden hurricane that sweeps the coast
where you live, or the birds that drop dead
at your feet and you smell the smoke
of wild fire blazing through a forest up north.
You don’t have to look far to understand exile
and homelessness. True, you still have a state
you claim as yours. But the sensation of being
in a vacuum, a dead zone, arises when your name
etched on an identity card or online records
cannot verify your existence, yes, that too
is the reality of anyone who swears by a country,
not to mention if your palms are charred
and your face alters with hurt.

Letter to Mahmoud Darwish

You had nightmares that the street you grew up in
forgot you, that the doors of the familiar vanished.
You wrote to melt the walls but saw them harden,
as you stirred your tea, breathing the Paris air,
memorising last night’s images. But if you are here,
you’d fall on your knees in the dust and weep
to see the children of Gaza, your kin,
buried in the fiery wreckage of Israel’s rage:

How can the ones who’ve seen death’s emissaries
become those emissaries? Heart-fogged,
how do they pour, pour, pour flames to burn my land?

You don’t have to ask these, your lament still echoes
through all your poems, memorised by us,
keeping every brick of Palestine alive. When you open
your window, you who only saw your garden,
irises and olives scenting the air, now watch
survivors wander, dazed, and you have
no words. You don’t turn away from the horror.
I know you will stay where it’s unbearable.
So, I turn to you in this soul-crushing moment
and read your words rescuing home.

Bread

After the explosion, after the unruly scattering,
uneasy quiet on the streets, shut windows,
litter.

The baker turns on the light in his shop,
wipes the front window with its single bullet hole
springing rays of splintered glass

and begins to knead the dough.
Someone’s got to make bread even during war,
he says matter-of-factly.

Soon people will step like shadows
onto the street, weave their way to him
and carry home a loaf to be shared.

Is This Love That Stone-Clad Treaties Cannot Sunder?

Behind her madras headscarf
and his hat framing it above,
her fingers claw the wall
to rise higher to
lock her lips with his.

The couple
just inches apart, the concrete
rising between them.

An open sky above, birds
migrating.

Innocence

A child bends down to pick up what you lost,
smooths down the fabric, star after star,
dust on her fingers

and skips up
to her mother’s call in the dusk,

the cosmos in her pocket.

Berlin Wall, 1989

In 1989, the Berlin Wall came down; East and West Germany finally became one. Siblings re-united. Friends and relatives met after a long separation. Lovers reconciled. I was working in a Quaker college when the news came. We believed in reaching decisions through consensus. Not the mere show of hands or voting, but convincing people through Socratic dialogue. It was time-consuming and messy. But the possibility of rancour was low. Our college did not last. Funds ran out and we closed. But I learned about true democracy.

When the Berlin Wall was dismantled, we celebrated. That same year, perestroika was declared in Russia. The old communist bloc broke up.

My husband, on returning from Germany,
hands me pieces of the Berlin Wall wrapped
in Deutsche Zeitung. Jagged cement, some powdery,
like fudge or pie crumble. People collect them
to remember the terror, the cementing of hearts.
In my palm, I see the crumbling of sorrow,
soft pulsations of joy feeding empathy into
brick and mortar. For a long time, I keep the dregs
in my purse. They seep through the paper,
smearing my makeup and ID like flour,
so each time I dust my fingers, I know why
walls rise wickedly from the earth.

Pachyderm Refugee

There she lay, a boulder, panting, in a muddy pool,
a large tear on her wrinkled posterior opening smooth pink flesh.

Don’t look away, as the men, dhotis rolled up their thighs,
bathe her, intoning “Irayana, Irayana,” soothing her.

Bow your head, as you did at the temple when she blessed you
with her trunk. You did not see her legs and torso cut by chains

tying her to the floor of a temple stall. Weep, as the men hose her
gray skin flapping open like a door to reveal the wound.

You wince as their brushes rub her obedient body stuck
in torture’s groove. Her fan-like ears had received her kin’s cries,

now are calmed with ointments, therapies embroidering her with balms
to reverse years of abuse in devout dens scented with incense.

Her knees are reverse L-shaped as she offers herself to treatment.
Heavy with grief, you kneel, your palms pressed together.

Excerpted with permission from Exile is Not a Foreign Word, Pramila Venkateswaran, Copper Coin.