Milking a Burning World

Drink, my dear. 

Take this night into your mouth 

and make it milk. 

Your hands knead the dark, 

the way small roots knead earth. 

The streetlamp stutters…  

as if the burning metal 

raining down this very night 

in the theatre of super-power 

has upset it. 

Hush. 

The sky tonight is troubled. 

Men chanting an ancient code 

are striking it against stone. 

Drink. 

Your breath is warm rain 

on the field of my chest. 

I still imagine a different normal— 

your shoulder bent under a small satchel, 

candies in your pocket, 

butterflies in your eyes. 

Tonight 

the wind returns bruised by missiles, 

carrying the searing smell of shrapnel. 

Even the owls lift slowly, 

the air bitumen-thick. 

Drink. 

Milk gathers in me 

the way underground water gathers 

beneath a listening hill. 

Your mouth draws it upward. 

Beyond this ash-covered roof, 

another child turns in sleep, 

searching the dark  

with the same blind mouth. 

Somewhere a woman  

bends over him, 
counting the breaths  

between explosions. 

I feel it. 

Wind crosses the roofs.  

The river keeps its patient course. 

Even the fields—burned, trampled— 

are storing a thin green hint  

for spring. 

Drink, my dear. 

Outside the sky is being busted 

to serve the inexhaustible hunger of weapons. 

Yet under the torn cloth of night 

this small white river 

flows from bone to mouth, 

from body to body, 

carrying the world 

a little farther 

into morning. 

** 

(Kamalakar Bhat is a bilingual writer, translator & professor of English. His published work includes a volume of essays by Kirtinath Kurtkoti, which he edited & translated)