Image: detail from painting by Jackie Berkley
1984
Shadows
A Poem by PARVINDER MEHTA
They come every year
asking me the same questions:
“How did it happen?
How did you deal?
Can we have a picture?
A sad face will look real!”
I have become a stone
to their pelting queries.
Hard grief penetrates
again and again. A broken
sculpture re-sculpted
to fit their mold. An image,
of burning now blurred beyond
memory, hammered by grief,
chiselled with loss haunts me,
yet they ask me again to describe
my feelings and anger.
Between the image and the words
the horror and the emotions
there is a bulwark of reality
asking me other questions.
How will I get my children their
next meal? Will my son’s miseries
end his life sooner? What is the future
of my daughter’s traumatic past?
They never ask these questions.
Stuck in that forced, dessicated past
plastered upon me, they try to peel off
dry layers in hopes of finding something
new. The dead stone keeps growing
nourished with this barrage of queries,
a dead cocoon and a dead gaze
only shows a barren ground
trampled upon by curious explorers
hoping to discover ignored histories
and painful memories.
They fruitlessly ask me about them -
the killers that ageing justice can’t see
anymore. These naïve reporters know not
their predecessors who also
asked, wrote yet failed like them.
Those dusty police files, pages torn
lest hideous secrets be revealed,
are submerged in cobwebs of apathy
and hollow compassion.
Justice knows not me
nor my plight. She simply left me,
a mere shadow of a dark past,
a mystery that will never see the light.
May 15, 2013
Conversation about this article
1: Kiran Kaur (London, United Kingdom), May 15, 2013, 8:24 AM.
Oh, Parvinder ji, you have pierced my heart and left me bleeding. You capture the pain and sorrow like no one else does ... and all s-o-o gently, with so much poise and so much serenity ...