Call For Submissions: Writers' Forum Online Literary Journal

A Legless Soldier Talks To A Pair of Boots

Jesto Thankachan 

of III BA English Copy Editor 

presents a post-colonial poem. 

Sometimes, academic courses inspire you to write poetry! 

A Legless Soldier Talks To A Pair of Boots

The nagging, unorthodox, slippery tongue 

of my thinking, matchless, leather boots

shocks me now in an absence...

My boot was the son of 

a dead percussion instrument,

pseudo-womb of repressed reverberations

in a spell-bound trauma.

They recast him to fit to my feet
as an obedient silence.

But his paralysed, glittering body's

coarse soul lain blessed with its

adamant, pithy tongue of violence.

My boots could recite the tyrannical fate 

of rascals from the life of his molested mother,

in a piece of lyric from Shakespearean tragedy.

I prepared myself to die in a cold prison

with these burnt flesh where me legs started,

and the black sediments precipitated

in the unused vessel of soul.

I argued a lot; read a lot, strived and 

starved to save the tongue of my boots.

But the epic of enigma within me,

the injected peril of power,

killed my boot's hidden tongue last day.

Now I too search for my drowned words

of the soul, in  a plague-like silence.

I Am A Merchant

Collins Justine Peter 

of III BA English Copy Editor 

presents a mystical piece this time

I AM A MERCHANT

On this dark and windy night, I hear the clouds sob outside. I do not settle and I do not stay. Since my birth I was a maker and now I am a merchant. I have ‘it’ which the insane world despises and forsakes. I see the miry path, in the sudden light outside. I set out with my haversack full of ‘it’. I hold a staff in my hand and venture out without a map.

I pass dawns and I pass dusks. I trod the hills and cover the plains. Sometimes I stand still and look up to the raging star. Sometimes I lie down and bathe in the tranquil stream on which the star reflects. I hear no Coyote and I am walking again. I hear no more nocturnal choirs but the tick of destiny. Hidden behind those giant trees, they have their bloody eyes on my haversack. I keep moving and I am a merchant from my land.

The merchant enters a civilization of a Persian dream. In awe of me, they clear the way. I see merchants, some haggling and some cheating. Some sell ‘it’ in full and some sell the leftovers. A pair of hands see my thirst and respond with a pot of flowing water. The water tastes like the lady standing before me with a bowed head. She receives my haversack and we move along through the crowd. I am no longer a merchant and now I have a home.