After the war, some are still singing
By Sneha Subramanian Kanta

                                                            for nani

                                             (I)

on cold floors of another land
for their beloveds to return.

Grief brings them to the brink
of a harbour. They scream into

neap tides. Praise the bodies
that live through memory.

                                            (II)

We vanish like osage oranges,
prehistoric seas, and songbirds.

Our ghost-bodies mitigate sorrows
of winter on window-frames.

                                       (III)                                           

Someone is always preparing for war—
every afternoon, from my window,

I watch people gather to watch a show
of guns and marching. Men in white 

mourn the whistle of a gun into summer air.
We sing eulogies for a country of exile.

                                         (IV)

Our singing is a preamble for dark hours.
Empty streets scream of another massacre.

Before we were a country, we were a body,
a foetus, a gleam in the ether. We sing until

                                         (V)

sundown, when mist appears like waves over
the cirrocumulus. After the saints fold holy

fragments like a napkin after supper, remnant
morsels of food are fed to the hungry.

An asymmetry of folded hands in a country
of war. Smoke-lines continue to blur the fields.

Sneha Subramanian Kanta is the author of Ghost Tracks (Louisiana Literature Press). Her chapbook received The Elaine Norman Fund for Canadian Authors. Her work has appeared in The Puritan, Contemporary Verse 2, Quiddity, and elsewhere. She is the Founding Editor of Parentheses Journal.