Two Poems by Tishani Doshi

If our ancestors really
lived in dust we could
kneel and emancipate
them from roots
of tamarisk

Even the calmest of us
will one day follow a thread
of gold and find a way to hang
from it, instead of riding its feathery
back into town. It is better

History is a ruin from which
we emerge—whose temple,
whose hill, whose house we
are now happily sitting in.
How else to explain

There were times we used
to haul out our mad in circuses
for Sunday tourists so we
could measure the distance
between them and us.

a holy land. A man in Jaffa
told me how he collects fragments
of bulldozed houses—somebody’s
hearth, somebody’s pewter knocker,
somebody’s father walking

I’m trying to tell you something,
but the helpline only works
during business hours. We
need new scribes for this ravage.
Here is my distress signal:

but perhaps I’m standing
too far to the left or right
because I can’t find a filter to describe
how talking about you is really
talking about me.

the knee and holding candlelight
vigils, what are we really saying
and is it enough? Imagine the world
as an aquarium. How some
are always staring from behind

Despite what they say,
there are still delicate cloisters
of coral to get lost in. But
as you descend you begin to see
creatures unchanged by time

there are pinwheels ablaze
and glowing tentacles that
reach to embrace you. Language
falls away and everything is
either light-giving or light-filled

and they’d tell us it’s better
to live as nomads. Not to get
too attached to the land or
ourselves, not to jump from
a window at our own party.

to begin as a bricklayer or cutter
of stone before becoming
a poet because so much depends
on who settles where and
who tramples whom.

the country’s new name,
the tanks on the horizon?
Strangers ask to be let in to
reclaim their old treasures but
are confused by the redecoration.

Now we trawl through airless
square boxes with callipers,
leaving messages on virtual shrines,
counting out followers. Beware
the Pied Piper who promises

down a corridor in a dark suit
and oversized glasses. One day
he will make a whole thing
from these shards but until then
we feast in a graveyard.

I arrive at meetings
with an olive branch and a gun.
I too want to lift everyone
by the wrists and insist on how mysterious all this is, how precious,

Even if we use hashtags and refuse
to cry for stones that have been
destroyed. Even if we believe we are
making a revolution from
the platforms of our boxes by taking

the hard polished glass,
while others cling to crags,
surviving on breadcrumbs.
Of course, there are beautiful
colours and bright schools of fish.

blind giants with trapdoor
mouths and leggy behemoths,
patrolling the sponge gardens.
It becomes difficult to breathe
and it is cold, but see

filigree, rib, fringe—unfurling
like flowers. The question
is how long can you go with
your prayers and what pictures
will you take while you’re there?