Soldiers and Missives

By Prithvijeet Sinha

THE MISSIVE

I send a letter to you,

with drops of blood dyed purple,

your favourite flowers pressed with them

and the smell of musk on this dog-eared paper,

to remind you of me.

 

In return,

send back

my whole hometown's exuberance,

a box of saffron

to entwine me to my land

and a promise to pray

and never blame God.

 

With deliverances of freedom,

pray for peacetime

to gallop

like a glorious stallion

on open land

and set me back home.


MACBETH C. 2021

It's so easy to wash one's hands,

rinse off all the blood

in a ceramic bowl

but the splotches will still show.

Look what war has made

of this home.

The blood on our hands

traverses the atlas,

open like a dusty tapestry

in the drawing room.

 

Blood on the table,

blood on the windowsill,

splotches here and there,

stuck like evanescence

on doorknobs,

not one corner spared from ghosts.

 

**

Smell of napalm wafts in the air

and the burning monk's images

make it obvious for him,

tiger eyes peek from beyond

the page

and mortal danger orchestrates stealth,

amidst the overgrown elephant grass

of forests now turned into

a battlefield in his mind.

 

When the world goes to war,

all the loons by the lakes

go dead silent,

as if on some suicidal spree

and the shore,

abuzz with their beck and call,

becomes scorching dry,

turned from fertile land

to sand dunes.

 

There is no sinister time for him

to lose his mind

because there has to be no greater

pressure-point than this war for sanity.

 

The blood on our hands

is dried clean

but the splotches still show.

Greater than a bullet wound

and far more sinister than the

general's fallacies from the front lines.

 

The War At Home starts from his bunker.

The clawing back to his room

ends in loud laughter

and then rage

and then death by combat

with his own ghosts.

The war at home begins there.

Prithvijeet Sinha has been prolifically publishing works of various hues in journals and magazines like   Cafe Dissensus, Confluence, The Medley, Borderless, Wilda Morris’ Poetry Blog, Screen Queens, Rhetorica Quarterly, Lothlorien, Chamber Magazine, Livewire  among others. He believes writing to be the true music of the soul.

.

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL.