Yesterday, my neighbor told me
that bulldozers had unleashed bandicoots on our street.
They strutted fearlessly on the sidewalk, she said
like fashion models.
Even the feral cats fled.
We frowned at the tall-walled construction site
willing the skeletal cement limbs
and puppet-angled cranes moving inside
to disappear…poof!
or at least
turn to ashes under our fiery third-eye gaze
giving us back its erstwhile wildness
The rodent appeared. Tentative. Sniffing.
Hugging the section where sidewalk met street.
“Shoo,” we cried.
Stamping our feet like warriors before a fight.
Her nostrils flared. Her tail quivered.
She didn’t move.
There she was. A refugee
who had lost her home to rubble and smoke.
Hated by her new neighbors
who were forced to take her in.
Refugee was published in The Mantelpiece May 2024. View issuu here
Poetry was my father’s gift to me. I began writing poetry after he passed away some years ago. Soon, I was deep into the world of small presses, literary journals and submitting to them. Refugee was published in The Mantelpiece Magazine, published in Iceland, in the May 2024 issue.
Bangalore is full of construction. If you stand in any street corner, you will see rats and rodents come out of drains deep under. One day, I was idling on the street, saw this rat and predictably had the “eww” reaction of distaste. Then I thought of displacement and what it means to have your home razed down…and so this poem.
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