POLITICAL Poem: All the Flowers At Rafa, by Sreyash Sarkar

There’s an alarm that is ringing

Neither dove nor lamb
Neither agent nor executioner
Red sky at night, abiding by every rule
The sun breaks its arms in agony
‘Will they all die?’, I ask
I think they will
Now that, Faqqua irises
Have a diet of tears
Healing in hiding
And the news, adept
At naming spaces after
The sound they make

But I must read a door
Even in error
Somewhere
A breath, a screech
A howl at humanity
A torn open flux
As big as I can
As small as I can

I’m just carpentered
With the gauge of
This time, this fleshed time
This distance from blood
The smokes, they don’t touch
The flowers in my drawing-room
Part of me, leaking out
into a pool that once looked like me
As all the flowers die
At Rafa
And sulphur coloured hate
So symmetrical,
Descend
To bury this setting outness

Why otherwise,
My heart would function still,
My body, move
My soul still in place
At the thought of
How little it belongs
to me even the death
Of burnt children.