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.