Migrants Though Time
By Ratika Kaushik

A girl under the fishnet, lips crimson blue

Lungs pulsating with water, breaths few.

Her hands clutching onto the ropes.

Of that dilapidated, rickety boat slew.

Medics arrive just in time,

Unbutton an already shredded blue dress.

Ribs and veins simmer with ocean lime.

The other half of her mangled self-lay bare and stone caressed.

All of eight years and 361 days, uprooted from a broken town.

Four days on the ocean, around the sun, with a little frown.

Gasping for breath and longing for a firm ground,

On her 9th birthday, she got older, bolder, bruised shouldered and brazenly colder. 

The men with stethoscope informed the frail mothership,

Your little one is brave, regurgitating every ounce of unwanted water dips.

Half-drenched and half-dead, the girl’s creator sighed:

“My dear doctor sir, we are migrants for life.

She will need to brave harder.

For the ocean is for all,

The sharing of land is the ultimate fall.

We are migrants through time. With undocumented wounds and unheard Schall”.

Ratika Kaushik is an assistant Professor at NIIT University but she is a poet at heart and loves to read and write poetry in her spare time.