Photo : Wikimedia Commons
Photo : Wikimedia Commons

Beast of Empire

Scholar Jinn Enters the Ink Doors and other poems
Photo : Wikimedia Commons
Photo : Wikimedia Commons


Taklamakan

Where the thread turns on you,
silk to supine, refuses to weave—
grows sinews to break free

Where Kublai Khan's royal seal
is not accepted—
You must pay a toll to the sinister
and the afreet*
for passage

You say you're a writer—
collecting fears for a king's ear

say you live
in the mouth of a princess

The ghosts of flaming catapults
have heard it all:
the banner and drum, javelin and sword,
vulture and kite, flesh rotting
in your talk,
heard the rattle of skulls in your tambourine,
the lies of empire turning your syntax blue

This afterworld of ammunition
a howl
whipping the desert

 *afreet: demon

* * *

Scholar Jinn Enters the Ink Doors

Pouring my world
down this sacred column

A copper nib

At the bottom:
a mirror
and a shadow

a wild horse missing a rump
another jinn
trapped between

a cold sigh
& grammar

encased in veined marble
humiliation

This exquisite
forbidden world

fashioned
of shisham & grain of other
aromatic woods

These doors
carved with poppies
These sound canals between our worlds

You may pass through
asleep in your green shawl

* * *

Beast of Empire

Elephant with emerald eyes on a studded copper plate
sprinkling rosewater in a Mughal court scene,
what, beyond bright or smoky stones
have you seen:
Tangled infantry, wall of spears,
riot of silk howdahs, hunting fevers, festivals
of light, trampled peasants, mahawat's pumice, dimpled
memsahibs, stun guns, massive palace doors
designed for you?

Elephant, you gasping mound of flesh,
recoiling in shock of fire-arrows
shot by Alexander's army in Punjab
the land of pronged rivers
You, a legend as war-booty
(more charming than Homer's catalogue of ships)
along with seventy-nine others from Porus's army,
rattling the Hydaspes battlefield in captive chains

Elephant alone in the dark with a hunger for truth,
offering each body part as a wildly whole fact
to the four men of Rumi's masnavi
encircled by certitude,
each calling you pillar,
fan,
waterspout,
or throne—
a disagreement between the many
full shapes appended to truth
under your mirror-work saddle

Elephant who held his emperor in the innermost chamber
of your heart, beast of the golden age
of poetry and of the master who was poet first
emperor last, who, in the end,
took the boat by the backdoor, Red Fort to Rangoon
Maula Baksh hathi, last Mughal elephant,
what mighty love,
to refuse food from the raj, to take beatings
from Colonel Sanders, to court a slow, drooping
death on the blunt blade of empire

Elephant ravaging the bazaar in Burma,
you were reported to the sub-inspector
for destroying a bamboo hut, turning over
the municipal rubbish van, raiding fruit-stalls
and killing a cow.
Alive, you were worth a hundred
pounds, dead, only five (for the tusks)
You also killed a man,
an untouchable coolie
found facedown in the mud—
his worth unchanged—
From under the plumage
of empire, an Englishman shot you
The rifle was a beautiful German thing
with cross-hair sights.

Elephant named after a Royal courtesan
Paisleys in white chalk
on your forehead,
you grace the Karachi zoo
as Anarkali come back from the dead
Jeweled, fragile,
you carry a mammoth ache
in your slow, flabby gait

~ Shadab Zeest Hashmi is the author of Kohl & Chalk and Baker of Tarifa. She has won the San Diego Book Award for poetry, the Nazim Hikmet Poetry Prize, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize multiple times. She has been published in Prairie SchoonerPoetry International, The Cortland Review, Vallum, Atlanta Review, Journal of Postcolonial Writings, and other journals worldwide. Her poems have been translated into Spanish and Urdu. 

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