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.

Lines

Here is a poem 

by  

Jude Gerald Lopez 

of  

3rd Year BA English Copy Editor

Is it greener on the other side?

Or does the same dust rise

If I wanted to find out,

Would man’s imagination stop me?

His world with tri coloured yet wrinkled pieces of cloth,

His world condensed within delusional lines

For me just as for a lake, it seems absurd

And so I ask

Just as the blind that has never seen the sun rise,

Rise into all this chaos,

And so I ask

Is it greener on the other side?

I vowed to stay true to You

Yet those curled up lines above an indigo stamp

Has made me find new soil for my potted plants

And the memory of drier soil

Quenches an age old thirst

That dies in drought, and revives itself in this purchased bliss

Forget the greenness or the bareness

I found something when I left

And in finding a dime I did lose all else

So I decide on my death bed

That as soon as I am liberated

I will come back

Beyond man’s lines of insecurity

Like the river I would like to be

With wind in my hair and lost dreams in my head

I will come

And as I run maybe, just maybe

Lead will meet a ghost’s flesh

And the green may turn red

But all the while, I will remain content

Knowing or not knowing

The manipulativeness of these curvy lines

That names us, who used to name all else.

LET IT RAIN

Collins Justine Peter of II BA English Copy Editor

is back with another work of short fiction 

She stands by the window and  breathes the dark night. Wind blew unusually strong. All I can see are two things; the lady’s long hair and the window curtains, waving in the dark wind. I go near the lady and my footsteps signal to her my approach. 

She asked, “why are these clouds dark and heavy like never before?”.

Now I have her tremulous arms on mine. I reply, “Let it rain”. 

She looks at me and asks, “Did that hurt you?” 

This time the drizzles begin to touch us and spread a cold through our cloudy minds. I gently close the windows and make the lady lie on bed. I hide her under the blanket and thus from the lightening night. Her eyes weigh in tiredness and she slips into sleep repeating, “did that hurt….did that hurt….did that……."

I lock the door, separating me and the lady for a while and come to my office cabin. I take a patient’s record from among many others and enter the name of a hypnotic drug which I administered on the lady. I have three fresh bloody scars on my neck which had just ceased its cry. She lost her six year old daughter six months before and I failed to notice my daughter climbing the parapet while we were playing on the terrace. Guilt and pain woke me up when I saw height consume her body.

Now all I need is my sun to rise and to see my wife out of the clutches of drug. I am all alone without her. Let it rain inside her in this dark night.