Islami Romantics

By Anupama Bhargava

Both of them look alike.

They come to me as

Ten fingers on the hands

Capped with smoke, dust and blood,

Out of the locked grills and their

Left ear, hanging over emptiness, deliberately concentrating at their face revealing

the solid rigidity of what’s going to happen to them, and

A strange assurance seems to have coated it.

They excavate pleads
from the hollow in their chest, from behind the cold iron at the end of the narrow

streets formed by their hands waiting as if for some one to fill in, but

Consuming time pretending to be, now, days.

Crashing against the acrid laughter teething in the modern world arena, is their invertebrated cry.

It rolls back to the rust in their hand,

Echoing

Terrorists’ question,

"Will you miss us?"

Before it crack them both open.

The soiled bodies, of no body knows who, bleed dead blood like the uncountable others,

And the guns whisper "Islam Zindabad!" (Long live Islam)