The Elsewhere War
By Kamalakar Bhat
 

In the sink,

my son’s lunchbox

still smells of curd rice.

The spoon is missing—again.

He’ll say the boys in class

flung it at the fan for fun.

On the TV,

another hospital crumbles.

A girl no older than mine

is pulled from the dust,

her braid intact,

her arm not.

I mute it.

Fold the towel.

Shake the ants off the sugar tin.

The war is elsewhere,

but it seeps through the walls -

in the questions my child asks

about uniforms and borders,

in the toys he begs me to buy.

At night, when I press oil

into his scalp,

he tells me he wants to pilot

a fighter jet.

I tell him,

be a river, mari, not a knife.

Somewhere, another mother

is ironing a shirt

her boy will die in.

I want a prayer

that hides in a thread,

in the games children play,

in the silence before rain.

Not to stop history,

just to hold one child’s smile

long enough

to let the world forget

missiles.

I want a prayer

that tastes like fruit from a roadside cart,

that wraps like a worn wool shawl in December,

that answers every child’s why

with a flower, not a flag.

I want a prayer

that rewrites all the endings:

the girl who bent down

to smell a flower,

manages to come home,

laughing, with a petal stuck in her hair.

Kamalakar Bhat teaches Literature in Maharashtra, India. He is an award-winning bilingual writer and a translator. He has published four collections of poems and three collections of translated poems in Kannada and has translated/edited four books in English.