On These Streets by Aparna Mitra

I saw a mob beat a man.
Terror in his streaming eyes mixed with threads
of suspended snot, hands — two small breakable shields
up against his face and the mob pawing,

impatient now. Raw tongue-teeth-maw circle in,
rough hands rip, shirt strips like flayed skin
trail off the thin back and a man dissolves
in animal howls. In this city, nothing moves.

Even the river, that wild muscled thing
flinging itself on rocks, gouging through granite
upstream, has grown thick-waisted here.
Grey is a terminal affliction.

It stains you. Decrepit, you return still
prospecting assurance in shadowless streets,
nostalgia hawked from high-street shops,
sterile in cellophane. The old mills ring

like bells, empty on the water’s edge
where the sullen river drags its feet
and behind green shutters, in darkened houses,
the poets write their dogged verse of betrayal —

bored adultery to defer thoughts of death.
Somewhere in this city (where nothing moves),
a mother longs for her son.
In her smudged mind, he is still ten.

She is calling him home, her voice waving
like a flag, waving through the shuttered lane,
in the high street shops, on the water’s edge,
by the empty mills, the darkened houses,

waving over the poets, the mob, the man,
each syllable an orange tongue
each syllable eating the grey.