He came bearing
a polished memoir,
wrapped in the grammar of duty,
stitched carefully
with the threads of allegiance.
The pages marched proudly—
disciplined, measured,
dressed in the language
of statecraft and survival.
Yet beneath the polished sentences,
ghosts wandered barefoot.
The ashes still remembered
the names of children
history buried too quickly.
Mothers still carried
silence like broken calabashes
upon their heads.
And the rivers of the East—
they have not forgotten.
For memory is stubborn.
It sleeps lightly.
It wakes
at the sound of old justifications.
He spoke of unity,
of difficult choices,
of burdens carried
for the preservation of a nation.
But nations are not preserved
by eloquence alone.
Sometimes history kneels,
not for defense,
but for repentance.
And so the book arrived
like rain that touched the earth
without entering it.
For many sons and daughters
of the red soil,
it sounded less
like a full reckoning
and more
like a door left half-open—
an incomplete confession
standing quietly
before a wounded generation
still waiting
for language heavy enough
to carry sorrow.
42 Mirrors
By Lucien Quincy Senna
Mirror, mirror
tell me all,
Who I am
Who I was,
painted seagreen with vanity
or socketed modesty.
Pride and pain
my old pretenders.
I am full of dead men's bones,
their advance over me.
I trashed and trotted
other people's causes,
statecraft of the most
sinister skull-duggery.
Mirror, mirror
see me now,
my strawberry leaves
for I am no longer twenty-four.
Pinking the raw edge of silk,
trusting it all.
Then that Ramshackle Empire
came clattering for me
a penal code
institutions for troubled women
"Pull your bellies between your knees!" said the nurse.
The hours pass upon the eastern turn
my faith anew while I was interred there,
until I somersaulted
out of the deep waters.
An ocean greyhound
who was simply considered
a whited sepulchre.
A mask for women over forty.
Witch hazel jumps the
gun. Questions arise.
Why the cuckoo will not sing today ?
I am drumming the wall
raised between us,
opening a small window towards the sea.
Strange things happen.
Full moon was bleeding
Astringent. I call for the mountain’s music.
This fractured statecraft.
You become a stone after a blast;
moving towards the periphery.
Half-naked a statuette
was walking in night to find a
mortuary where Apollo was laid to rest.
Satish Verma
Delta. I was the fourth child.
The delta connection of a
triangular love. No blues.
Only cottony belly.
My copper coins. I want to save
them for making talismans.
My arms are entwined like
a python around the neck of a medusa.
That hairy push of a trident.
The stinging tentacles. The
polyp was enlarging. Now the
snake was shedding the skin.
Statesmen. They change their colour
like chamaeleon. Prehensile
tail trailing behind the witch-
craft of black goddess.
Satish Verma
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