Hiruda's Bones (ii)

(For the poet who carved verses with a farmer's hands and a revolutionary's axe)

I.
The skull of words?
I keep it in my japi hat,
Where monsoon sweat
Rusts vowels into fish-hooks—
Sharp enough to pull poems
From the Brahmaputra's throat.
Hiruda grins:
"Good. Now make them bleed."

II.
Centuries? Jubilees?
Let the calendar moths
Eat their gilt edges.
I measure time
By how long
A betel leaf's stain
Lingers on hospital walls
Where he coughed his last verse
Into a nurse's ledger—
"Record this as:
'Patient spitting blood
Or possibly poetry.'"

III.
Tonight, under kerosene lamplight,
I suture consonants
With fishing line and gamocha thread.
Each knot a revolt:
This one for flood-soaked rice fields,
This for midnight arrests,
This for the way
His typewriter keys
Still echo in police station attics
Where they stored his "seditious" ink.

IV.
Comrade,
If you've come to mourn,
Bring whiskey and a crowbar.
We'll pry open
The dictionary's coffin—
Not to resurrect,
But to steal back
The teeth
They tried to bury.

V.
Now watch:
I'll plant these word-bones
In the tea garden's red earth.
Let the British manager's ghost
Choke on their flowering.
Hiruda whispers:
"When they call this 'folklore',
Show them the scars
Where the handcuffs bit."