eastbaypoetics.com

There must be some cell in your body
that remembers
your father’s arms cut off
his torso
with a British ax.
Brown hands that
planted, watered,
harvested you
on borrowed land

falling bloodily away.
Where they touched earth,
they were named
Bangladesh and Pakistan.

Surely you recall
mother’s final exhalation;
the ulcered belly
whose memory of bearing, once
– a world away from her birthplace –
your baby flesh,
was buried with her
in her grave.

Down the front of my body,
the tearing of Punjab
into two
leaves a gash, stapled over,
crusted with the salt of red tears;
I do not weep as my daughter
washes away the dead tissue,
do not cling to what must
be freed.

My children’s feet will step
across the scar
that makes — unlike nature –
three from one:
pieces embedded
together,
each unclaimed by the other,
abandoned.

© 2009 tahminah zaman