Pragya Vishnoi
SHE HAD SOME SISTERS
after Joy Harjo
Dedicated to Kashmiri Pandits who faced massacre and exodus from their homeland in 1990.
She had some sisters
She had sisters who were yellow summer noons
She had sisters who had camphor bones
She had sisters who spit out sun each dawn
She had sisters who made love like a smothered star
She had sisters who called themselves Pandit
She had sisters who called themselves nothing
She had sisters who thought their neighbors would save them
She had sisters who knew their neighbors would rape them
She had sisters who said no and got killed
She had sisters who said yes and got killed
The fish are hurling themselves out of the river and wild geese are falling from the sky filling our laps with armfuls of white blossoms. Mountain wolves have given birth to lambs who are allergic to both grass and meat.
She had sisters who made a santoor from their bones and sang the sweetest dirges
She had sisters who filled maswal flowers in their lovers’ headless bodies and slept in shamshaans
She had sisters who smelled like saffron
She had sisters who smelled like burning orchards
She had sisters who made a shrine of their sisters’ cut tongues
Swords chased lambs out of our wombs and filled them with the sound of a thousand crows flapping wings.
She had sisters who braided their brothers’ veins in the manes of horses
She had sisters who coaxed the spirits of our ancestors back at the kitchen table
She had sisters who grew corpses in their homes
She had sisters who carried razed temples in their bones
She had sisters who had nothing to lose
She had sisters who had nothing to gain
She had sisters who danced in a gathering of ghosts
She had sisters who knew the song to bring dead lovers’ back
She had sisters who knew the song to break their rapists’ backs
She had sisters who used to drink kahwa
She had sisters who swallowed the decapitated idols of their gods
We wake up and everyday it’s spring. The dawn has teeth and our bodies are inside out with our organs exposed.
She had sisters who wanted to go back
She had sisters who never wanted to go back
She had sisters who wanted both
She had sisters whose skins bristled like a wish rubbed raw
She had sisters whose skins burned like dry ice
She had sisters who cracked moon with their fist, warm and molten.
She had sisters who slept like ghost fish.
She had sisters who woke up like a static hum
She had sisters who laughed like a bombed school
She had sisters who leapt across the edge of worlds
She had sisters who kept in their purses our dead sisters’ curls
She had some sisters who were Pandit
She had some sisters
—from Rattle #73, Fall 2021
Tribute to Indian Poets
__________
Pragya Vishnoi: “As an Indian poet, I was more inspired by short stories and novels especially by Dharmveer Bharti Ji, Jai Shankar Prasad Ji, Premchand Ji, and Rabindranath Tagore Ji. As a child, I didn’t enjoy poetry as much as I loved prose. Then I stumbled upon Jai Shankar Prasad Ji’s poem ‘Chhaya Mat Choona’ when I was 14 years old. I was stunned by the melancholic beauty of the poem and the magic weaved by the poet. When I was 18, I read poems by Russian women poets, and it was then poetry became something divine for me. My country has been invaded multiple times, and we were captives of invaders for a thousand years. Even today, there’s no week when we don’t lose our soldiers to terrorist attacks. The wounds of oppression and massacres are still present in our collective psyche and, as a result, I became interested in Indian gothic poetry. I’m a practicing Hindu and our religious texts place a greater importance in cosmology, so cosmology is not just a dry subject based on only tangible equations. The meeting of cosmology, spirituality, and futurism is something I’m very much interested in exploring.”
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