God’s Habit of War

There are wars that never stop.
It becomes a habit in many tongues, many languages.
In our desert houses, there are no windows,
sunlight moves from room to room
like orphaned children running with bleeding wounds,
still laughing together.
Everyone lives happily here –
it becomes a habit.

She loves my curly silver hair
washes it with orange oil as a holy ritual.
She keeps doing it again and again.
My body shivers; it pleases me and also scares.
I know she is possessed by my happiness –
it becomes her habit.

My memory burns –
the graves of my brothers and sisters
scattered like vanilla flowers,
squirrels licking them as beads of prayer.
I have never known such a thing – God’s habit of war.

Love in Beirut

the sun quivers with unfulfilled desire –
charred trucks, buses, cars
piled upon each other at the gas station;
streets still full of life, houses dressed in Hawaiian daffodils,
shops selling marinated fossils of our happiness,
neighbors in masks
gathering minced debris falling from the sky;
we meet in the corner of a tunnel bookshop;
her lips smell of smoky roasted eggplant,
her dark olive breasts swelling with terror;
slowly she parts her green thighs –
we make love in grudging daylight –
I raise my head:
a mist of blood and blueberries on the window;
good lovers never speak ill of poets and prophets.

Gulliver’s Land

I always keep a map in my pocket –
on trains, on buses, even while cycling in the park.
Often I buy fruits at the supermarket
only after checking the map,
as though pineapples or plums came from Gulliver’s land,
Like an old storyteller I insist
on describing curious details of my city –
its repetitive lanes, inconsequential medieval monuments
and museums covered with khaki ribbons.
My history is unflattering, but my geography full of surprises –
I am an asylum seeker in my own country.

Something Survives Even in War

There is something so beautiful about a bowl of cherries,
as if strangers arrive carrying mirrors of dreams.
My eyes grow green, my lips flower and fruit,
we kiss like wild seabirds tearing the harbour open,
my tongue learning the language of sugar cane fields.

We walk through the edge of charred night –
she recedes slowly, an emerald ship in the bed.

I wake inside the dying moon’s eye, lazily wandering
across whispering lilac leaves, as if nothing has happened.
Something survives, even now, even in war.

She is remembering herself,
and I am missing memory of morning sky.

Nation of Harmoniums

The harmonium simmers –
a strange orchid fragrance spreading between twin islands,
grieving like memory and miracle.
I hear someone collecting charred seasons
from deserted rooftops and riverbanks.

It is fiery summer –
not easy to carry the dead bodies of your parents
in an olive green school bag.
I don’t know if you know: I was born without a nation.

These days my neighbours are sleepless;
the black butterflies are missing.
Fearing their extinction in jars of mustard oil,
I lean against her eyelashes –
a soft rebellion pulsates in our bodies.

They want to see me dead,
but I like to wait for a hurricane, returning fragments of my home.
I repeat her name,
stroke her whispering lips softly, and rot in the rain of raags…

Must I Be a Witness to God’s Every Sin

There are strange things going on in my neighbourhood –
everyone is writing memoirs
of days and nights they don’t remember in their language.
After memorising the date and place of my birth,
I try to write too –
keep trying all day,
even inventing a childhood, a youth.
By evening, I am exhausted.
For people of my age,
history is an almost impossible horoscope,
written after the violence of bougainvillaea.
Must I be a witness to God’s every sin?
I am not only a little wounded, here and there –
I am completely erased from my own memory.

Vegetarian Verse

All my parts were human – except my appetite.
I believed in neither sun nor moon –
perhaps there was a prophecy
that I would grow too quickly into a vegetarian.

The afternoon was beautiful.
My body had become a meat shop,
and I slowly started shredding it
with her rusted silver earrings. She stood naked,
watching me become addicted to cruelty.

A terrible desire entered my fatty liver;
I had no idea what fear was.
All I wanted was her body –
like the taste of tamarind, orange, and lime,
not in the same order.

After years of quarrels with my flesh and bones,
there is nothing I can do now
except agreeing with her –
the body becomes vegetarian again.

Ashwani Kumar is a poet, political scientist, and professor. His most recent book is Map of Memories (2025). He is at present a visiting professor in the US.