Jaswinder Bolina - What Awaits the Thunder

Jaswinder Bolina
What Awaits the Thunder


Is a decided stillness, a silence that could overwhelm the artillery,
though the war wears on unflinching. I turn to you and say,
It’s so difficult to be in love in wartime. We view no photographs
of the dead, but bombers dive like whales in the sky. I pursue them,
their symbolic, until you tell me, Knock it off, until it becomes so
difficult to behave myself. The telephone whimpers in disconnecting.
Our ears in silence hang like sails in no wind. I grow blind
in one eye, we sleep beneath a palmetto, our legs overlapping
in a too warm bed until you kick me. In morning, news
from the front dribbles thick milk into the dishes of satellites,
and we sip from these without any idea what the clamor is about.
We only want them to forgive us and send coffee beans.
This reminds you of a story in which the father says,
What happened before won’t ever happen again,
and tearfully, the boy accepts this, because he desires so much
to accept and forgive and embrace his father again. By then,
he’s a grown man and isn’t ashamed of openly weeping.
I weep openly and sight returns to my bum eye. The garden grows
stereoscopic in the murky and shuddering light. A familiar
anxiety disperses, and a new anxiety resounds in its place.
I feel claustrophobic in the hailstorm. I grow murderous in the fog.
You say knock it off. I say it’s so difficult to be in love.