they say the rice won’t grow without blood

BY SREEJA NASKAR

      a man opens his mouth & a border spills out.  
      a grandmother unspools her tongue like thread,
      stitching her children into the fabric of a country  
      that never wanted them.  

         they say this is progress. 

                   (they mean:)  
                   the skin thinned to paper —  
                   the hands blistered, still reaching —  
                   the lungs filled with air thick enough to swallow.  
                             (they mean:)  
                            look how well you have learned to survive.  
                            how your bones folded neatly into history. 
                                                                                            but we know.  
                we know what it means to be asked for our papers.  
                to be split between two alphabets & never whole.  
                to carve out our own faces with the sharpest vowels  
                until we are palatable. marketable. safe. 

                                                       (they say we are lucky to be here.)
               
                                                                                            lucky.  

                                                                    
                         lucky like my mother learning  

              the price of shame at the grocery store.  
               (the clerk’s mouth curling around her accent  
                another thing she must swallow whole.)   

                         lucky like my father with his hands 
              roughened by the steel of a land he could never own.  
               (the factory hums. the sweat dries.  
                the paycheck arrives. the hunger stays.)  
        (somewhere) they are building monuments  
       from the bones of the silenced.   

       (somewhere)  the land forgets the sound of its own name.  
       concrete buries it whole.   

         this is history, they say.  
                                  (they mean:)  
                                the textbooks that forget us —  
                                 the flags stitched with the tongues we lost —  
                                 the songs we were too tired to sing.   

                    (they say we should be grateful.)   
                                                                            (they mean we should be quiet.)

       but i remember.  
       i remember the rice fields & the rivers thick with ghosts.  
       the prayers my grandmother whispered to the soil.  
       the stories that split her open & stayed.   

           they say the rice won’t grow without blood.            (and still, we eat.)

Sreeja Naskar is a high school poet based in India. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poems India, Crowstep Journal, The Chakkar, ONE ART, Frigg Magazine, The Little Journal, and Cordite Poetry Review, among others. She believes in the quiet power of language to unearth what lingers beneath silence.