After the putsch, through night he set himself alight
ensnared in flames of societal conflicts, for a
vision of tomorrow, in the birth of a bloody dawn.
The drone of history had failed on a loaded salt.

A solitary murder of truth was sufficient to unsettle
me for a downturn of unborn wounds of drowned
voice, of a requiem. The dead were coming back to life
in dark alleys of black skulls. The pink scarves

were still holding the snow flakes of standing
wheat for the thirsty children, of grieving mothers
who lost the homes to red hands, the white paper,
the hungry guns. The thieves were coming again.

I was never naked in my blood, my howling bones.

Satish Verma