I
Words by words,
we come out.
The world is heavy
with the weight of wounds.
The assembly of ‘me too’
a floodgate of ‘it happened’
Who are we speaking to?
You? you, unlistening, nothing.
Hey? yes, you
Does the shadow of what you do,
never meet the soul of you?
II
The door opens,
closes, a creak.
Faraway, a howl —
winter night’s
acoustics of loneliness.
In nightmares
I hear his mother tongue
of fear break out of his throat
Mother in many tongues
must be the language of love
and a cry!
Language is memory,
he grinds his teeth in sleep
when loss erupts,
of words he could never use with me
We in love
have lost each our tongue
We interpret each to each
mountains and childhood
and watered down jokes
because the punchline
is untranslatable.
III
Women, migrants everywhere.
Whose homeland should
you defend?
You drown deep in others’ voice.
Sacrosanct means nothing,
though its smell reminds
you of burnt out scents.
How does it taste — the
venom poured on you?
You are responsible,
for the lost rainbow
of a new land.
Look at the mirror, you
have no reflection.
Ahh, what you see there,
that face, is not yours.
Look at the mirror, hate
what you see, it is not you.
Look up, your cosmos are
dead things, dead stars
pretending aglitter.
You,
Step out,
Annihilate.
Soibam Haripriya’s poems appear in the anthology Centrepiece: New Writing and Art from Northeast India, published by Zubaan