By Debasish Mishra
The glistening neck of blue
and an extra eye of fire
a sight
of wonder
of Shiva
I’d have touched
his feet had the whirring
of the fan not stirred
my untimely afternoon nap
I had dreamed two disparate
things that almost
formed a hybrid—
one: the lynching
of a black man
by anonymous faces
or robots I can’t exactly say
and two: his neck turn blue
as though exposed to
an alkaline solution
while the forehead cracked
for the birth of another eye
This dream or whatever
keeps rocking the shores
like a dreaded news
I tried to narrate this
to my friends in the tea-stall
and they all had a good laugh
Stop watching American
news, they said
Stop reading Shiva Puran too
This is what happens
when the West intrudes
into the East
Your head is badly colonized
I feigned to laugh
as if it were a joke
Thankfully the explosion
was but confined
to my inner eye
Debasish Mishra is a Senior Research Fellow at National Institute of Science Education and Research, HBNI, India, who has earlier worked with United Bank of India and Central University of Odisha. He is the recipient of the 2019 Bharat Award for Literature and the 2017 Reuel International Best Upcoming Poet Prize. His recent poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Penn Review, Prism Review, Consequence, Weber, ANMLY, and elsewhere. His first book Lost in Obscurity and Other Stories was published by Book Street Publications, India, in 2022.
