if i can’t see the poem i write & it grows open, by Debasis Mukhopadhyay

  for Asifa Bano

yes now the blood is off her dead legs
the blood is off their foreskin at a perfect standstill
the blood is off nothing that comes of nothing

if i can’t see the poem i write & it grows open
like a gul-e-nargis
there ain’t no blood to blind on the flag of the nation
there ain’t no blood to dot the landscape of Kashmir
just a small body making up the white of the page like this free verse.

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Asifa Bano: The child rape and murder that has Kashmir on edge