‘I’m fine, because that’s what the world wants to hear’: Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih’s lament for Gaza

(Mowing the Grass)

When I declined an invitation
for lunch because
I had to mow the grass,
my friends laughed.

“Are you a mali, then?
Or a cattle rearer, perhaps?”

Mowing the grass,
trimming the trees,
weeding the flower bed,
keeping the body in shape,
filling the mind
with lovely thoughts.

Mowing the grass,
grooming the earth.

Oh, the beauty of mowing the grass!

Little did I know
when caged cities are flattened,
when homes and hospitals,
when schools and churches and camps
teeming with women and children
are bombed out of existence,
and the bodies of thousands
upon thousands
are blown to pieces
for the crime of a few
(if fighting for freedom is a crime),
in the language of genociders,
it is merely
mowing the grass.

Oh, the horror of mowing the grass!

What devilish hand or heart
has twisted such lovely words
so devilishly out of shape?

(I Will Certainly Not Pray)

Some zealots are sending me a message:
“Let us pray for our Zionist brothers.”

With deep anguish, I think
of our people’s Three Commandments,
especially two:

Live in the knowledge of man and God.
Earn your virtue.

I wonder if praying for Zionists
is living in the knowledge of man and God
or earning my virtue.

I will certainly not pray for genocide;
I will certainly not pray for ethnic cleansing;
I will certainly not pray for the evil from hell
unleashed upon the earth.

A great remorse washes over me;
a great abhorrence overwhelms me
that these – my people –
should idolise devilishness for godliness.

(Doniya)

A western reporter,
condescending as ever,
asks Doniya,
“How are you, dear?”

I’m fine, the Gazan girl says.
Although I may not live
after this interview,
indeed, a drone may come
any moment now,
even as I talk to you on Zoom,
but I’m fine.

We have no food,
except for stale canned food
now and then.
We have no water,
no medicines,
no fuel,
no electricity,
because the Israelis
have imposed a demonic siege
that not even
the super powers can lift,
because they are
the chosen people of God,
and God is all-powerful and all-evil,
may Allah forgive me!

We are dying,
we are dying all the time,
from bombs,
from bullets,
from missiles,
from drones,
from helicopters,
from jets,
from diseases and epidemics,
from starvation,
from famine,
from BBCs,
the Bullshit Broadcasting Corporations,
but I’m fine.

We have no homes,
we have no schools,
no mosques,
no churches,
no hospitals,
no malls,
no open markets,
not even streets.

Our homes,
our schools,
our mosques,
our churches,
our hospitals,
our malls,
our open markets,
even our streets
have been reduced to rubble
with the rest of Gaza,
but I’m fine, I’m fine.

We have neither camps nor shelters.
We are not even refugees any more,
we are sheep and cattle driven from place to place
with pieces of paper dropped from the sky.

But even with sheep and cattle,
people do not slaughter so senselessly
as they slaughter us, the Israelis.

They say, go to this safe zone,
we are going to bomb you here.

We walk, we crawl, we creep,
and we are bombed
as we walk, we crawl, we creep,
and we are bombed
when we reach.

There are no safe zones here:
Gaza is a Nazi laboratory:
their subject of study,
ways of butchery.

Babies are killed in their incubators,
children are bombed crowding around food trucks,
the sick at hospitals or in their ruined homes
with monstrous dogs unleashed
by even more monstrous handlers.

There are body parts hanging everywhere:
on walls and fences, on top of ruined buildings.
There are even little girls, their heads blown off,
hanging on electric wires.

And we know the Israelis will not stop
until all of us, the lab rats of the world, are eradicated,
and all because they are the chosen people of God,
and God is all-powerful and all-evil,
may Allah forgive me!

But I’m fine, I’m fine,
despite everything, I’m fine,
because that’s what the world wants to hear.

Its consoled that I’m fine,
its conscience is soothed,
the horrors do not trouble it any more –
they are fine, destruction becomes them.

(A Song of Consolation)

Among the wreckage of blown-up homes,
a young poet sits on a fallen concrete,
playing his pear-shaped oud,
singing a song of consolation.

Oh, mother, all the houses
have been bombed to rubble!
All the people have fled!
The thousands who could not flee
are lying under the ruins!

But do not grieve, dear mother!
Can you not see all these stones
lying around?

Now we have more stones
to build our new home!

Now we have more stones
to build our new home!

(Counting Their Gains)

The traders in blood
are counting their gains.

Two hundred souls
yesterday,
women and children,
but a few men, too,
though not the ones
with thermobaric warheads,
sadly, never those men.

Today, it promises well.
Fifty babies already,
terrorists all,
though in their cribs,
terrorists, nevertheless.

Our Amalek bombs
are cutting them in half
and blowing them all over the sand.

Wonderful! Yahweh has been kind
this genocidal season.
Our stock market of destruction
is rocketing into the sky of Zion.

(Genocidal Stratagem)

Starve Lure Kill:
this is the proven thing.

Starve them to desperation
To weed-eating hunger
Lure them with food aids
Aid as bait
Herd them like animals
To designated aid pens
Kill them there
In greater
And greater numbers
Livestream it
So the West
So full of voyeurs
Bloodthirstier
Than the bloodthirstiest
Will send more and more
Mass-killing machines.

And the Bullshit Broadcasting Corporations will say:
The IDF has issued statements:
There’s no genocide in Gaza.

(Genocide Tourism)

As the children starve in Gaza,
in Zionist Palestine,
people emerged
from their iron domes,
went into the rolling hills,
unpacked their picnic baskets
and settled down to watch
the pounding.

May one day,
others watch them, too,
from picnic spots

(Lumps of Salt)

The easiest way to hunt
the nimble deer
is to place lumps of salt
on strategic spots
and wait among the bushes.

They will always come to the salt
they need it to survive.

These aid trucks
are the Gazan children’s
lumps of salt.

Even a hail of Zionist bullets
will not keep them away.

So they die by the hundreds every day
shot in the head, the stomach, the testicles.

This was how they wiped out the bison
from the Great Plains of that genocidal nation.

All for the pleasure of slaughter.

(Blue Planet)

From outer space
the blue planet seemed
to an astronaut
like “The Garden of Eden”.

On drawing nearer
the blue turned
into the bloody red
of a live-streamed genocide.

(Never Human Again)

Bloodied
emaciated
her eyes sunken
a six-year-old girl
plods through
mountains of rubble
blown-up bodies
carrying
her three-year-old sister
on her frail shoulders
carrying her
pain in her eyes
carrying her
pain in her grimace
carrying her
pain in her wracking sobs.

Never will the world
carry the Gazan children
on its shoulders!

Never will it be human again!
A ravaging monster from the desert
has devoured its soul.

(Speak Not to Us)

“Speak not to us again
of your virtue,
your values,
your order.

Speak not to us
of your civilisation,
of your human rights,
of your democracy.

We see you.
By the light of these flames,

we see you.
By the screams of these children,

we hear you.
By this holocaust,

we know you.
We truly know you.”

What else can I add
George Galloway?
you are the pathologist
of this Genocidal Age!
But where, oh, where,
the Physician?

(Healer)

Come back to me.

Your going home is homegoing.
I have fallen ill,
and the years have reversed themselves:
60 is 06.

In your homegoing,
I have become a child
crying for his mother,
with all the wild desires
and all the pure longing of childhood.

Come back to me.

This Satanic turd, this Baby Butcher,
who says, “No country on earth can stop us”
from killing them, these “human animals”!

This woman, whom we know so well,
who hates the poets so much,
who wants them exposed
for the fools that they are,
not knowing it is herself,
exposed for the fool that she is.

This builder, who cut down my trees;
this neighbour, who clear-felled his land,
scattering these poor birds everywhere.

Who will save me from them
and the threatening red rage,
but your love
so like a breeze on a hill?

Come back! Our favourite hour
is slipping
into the night!

Come, I want to see again,
how you look at the moon
when it hides
between white cumulus clouds.

I want to hear you say,
“Look at how he hides!”

After the bloodiness of genociders
and their bloody lies,
after the petty cruelty of friends and foes,
I want to hear the wonder in your voice.

(My Answer)

On a dark morning,
full of ethnic cleansers
killing babies in their incubators
and dancing on TikTok,
on a sullen morning
full of poets praising bad poetry,
and villainous psychological abusers,
gaslighting the conscience of the world,
I turn to the trees in my garden.

The pears are plentiful this year,
and my sohïong, the black cherry tree,
is bearing fruits for the first time.

And you, always loved, always cherished,
though far away,
your hands, I can feel, are nimble,
calming the raging tide in my bosom.

To every disappointment,
you are my only answer.

(Stone)

A Tiger in the forest speaks to a stone:

“Oh, Um Long, is it wrong for me to kill this man
when his kind had laid a trap for me … tried to kill me?”

Mawlong says, “What to say, Um La!
Look behind you, down there.
Do you see those small boulders
and stones broken to pieces?
Once, they were up here with me;
look at them now:
nothing but mere splinters.
And how did that come about?
It was man.
He dug them up,
pushed them down the cliff
and beat them with hammers.
I’m telling you, Um La;
I live in constant dread of man.
I don’t know how long I have
before he comes for me too.
As long as this creature lives,
there will be no peace on earth.
Eat him, Um La,
destroy him before he destroys us all.”

The Tiger could not eat,
for man multiplied beyond destruction.

And the stone has suffered ever since:
He is dug up with monstrous machines,
blasted with explosives,
beaten and broken with iron tools.

He has survived, however,
unlike the Tiger and his forests.
A monolith, he sees all, he hears all.
Inside him is locked the tales of generations gone.

But having learnt to read from books,
we can no longer read from stones.

Cut off from our history, recorded in stone,
we can only pose with punkish clothes
and click our punkish photographs.

It is time to move on with the times.
I will plant a monolith and chisel
words of remembrance too.

They will say:

In censure of the live-streamed genocide.

In denouncement of neo-Nazis
and terror states everywhere.

In solidarity with the children
slaughtered in the Gaza Holocaust.

(Asked about the Horror)

Asked about the Gaza ceasefire
after Gaza is no more,
after hundreds of thousands
are no more,
asked about the cessation
in the killing of babies and children,
women and the sick,
asked about the withdrawal
of human demons
into their dome of iron,
a man, living in a tent,
with two of his children,
one with her legs blown off
(five have lost their lives)
replied:
“The first chapter of my anguish has ended.
I will now open the second.
I will dismantle my tent
to erect it in the wreckage of my home,
far away to the north
in the mountains of ruins …

“With our death, we won back our life.
With our defeat, we won a great victory.”

Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih is a poet and novelist. His latest works are Funeral Nights (Westland/And Other Stories) and The Distaste of the Earth (Penguin India). He teaches literature at the North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong.