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APRIL MORNING
Lalita Pandit
Little feet,
feverish in frostbite
sores are cherry blossom buds,
uncut hair brims over eyes,
reddened hands cup around lips
to call out names.
Do children deny
evade the way we do?
Next door neighbor’s child
is in a tattered tent
somewhere alien, surrounded
by grudging pity,
indifference, suspicion.
An older
brother, their own
disappeared
ten years ago; by now
he’d be married.
Fatima, the
beautiful
would have been
a sister-in-law, in their home
helping their mother.
An ancient call
for play
on an April morning
is the same.
The
sun is warm as always
soothes purple skin.
Feet will heal when
Spring
blooms turn to greenish fruit
covered in foliage.
Children see
things in
the woods near the lake.
Autumn leaves, pine cones
brush rise up
to become conjoined limbs
of men, women, children.
Little Shafi
has a dream.
A sheep heart gets up
from the embers, walks away.
Shafi begins to laugh;
it is a clown
putting on lips and eyes
gives careful form to a moustache:
a real Man.
Its voice is
familiar.
He let a Hindu
girl be
raped, her hacked limbs
displayed
at the market place.
They rotted like a
sick,
thrown away lamb’s:
dried like morel mushrooms.
Sarla was a
nurse
at the Sher-e-Kashmir Hospital.
In the dream,
Shafi’s brother
says, yes, he did it and it was right.
He confesses to the trees, the last few
icicles and a stoic moon.
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