By Iona Datt Sharma https://queerenvironment.wordpress.com/2023/08/21/two-poems-by-iona-datt-sharma/
i. you can’t come in
What are you like, love? What do you do?
Only child. Bitterly, poet. Job, boyfriend.
We ask, y’see, so we can chat to him while we’re cleaning him up in his room.
You can write him letters.
The days here are getting longer. You are very much missed. Remember how spring comes to our shoreline, vast with the memory of the twenty-two springs before.
We have lived so long and well in this place.
ii. you can’t go home again
The phone shrieks like crows. How are you, love? Woh kaise hai? An urrainn dhut a bhith làidir?
I am fine. He is not. I am the rocks, I am the wind and the water; I am my father’s daughter.
I write letters.
iii. you can’t leave here unchanged
Do you remember when I last saw you? The bright, lonely platform; the train, its heavy grace. You put money in my hand.
Brine, salt, sludge.
The flooding of lungs.
iv. COVID-19
These endless days
numbered in markers
CRP; haemoglobin;
a shadow on the brain.
Not yet pain.
The range of the tide remains to be determined.
We have lived so long in this place.
How do you know a writer’s Indian? Sooner or later they’ll bring up a parent on a train platform. How do you know a writer’s American? Sooner, rather than later, they’ll bring up guilt. Oddly enough neither Russia nor Britain have tells that would work for all writers. This probably just means that I don’t read enough Indian writers.