অপেক্ষা/Waiting POETRY Abhijit Sarmah

Since the late 1970s, thousands of Assamese youths have joined numerous insurgent groups active in the northeast region of India. Their family members and loved ones still wait for their return.

mother waited for four weeks three months two solstices until the rainbow of my appetite dribbled into her burnt cooker of rice, now I am the frozen birches hunched against every sprawling town, the swish of damp December wind, unimagined like our hunger for a tomorrow garbed in pink leaves on our long way home. by the Ichamati, I imagine immortality and touch the wet prints of evenings more elaborate than oblivion, which reminds me guilt is mostly concocted, an old father hobbles home with deep burns on his back tonight, and the slow sobs of a widowed sister cough through an empty askew dyke—

If they push too far, tell them we are the first butterflies of monsoon floating through the crimson of a wet July or a moonstruck garden of lassoed coneflowers reeling and spilling, from end to end, long enough to wrap the giant moon— as long as you try, this is the closest you can get to some old-world style truths, to us, we are named lucky, we carry our people through the fissures of the meanest red and languages they do not speak. we are the setting desires of the dark season, demonstrations on the wild drives of time. back home, my lover still cross-stitches kabans on her gero and sings about the time I came to the river side of her village. Who am I to tell her to not wait by the Subansiri or prepare talisman every Bohag for an endless battle? My people sing to me from a place where we don’t number the dead, from where the world is an alien whisper. Every day they glue their ears to the river and wait.

Kaban: songs of lamentation sung by the people of Mishing tribe in Northeast India;

Gero: a type of cloth that is wrapped round the waist or chest by Mishing women;

Subansiri: a trans-Himalayan river and a tributary of the Brahmaputra River;

Bohag: spring, the first month of the Assamese year.

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Kiera Stuart