Garima Chhikara
Garima Chhikara is a writer from Bangalore, India. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Forge Literary Magazine, Hobart, Lost Balloon, Sky Island Journal, La Piccioletta Barca, Halfway Down the Stairs, among others. Find her at garimachhikara.com.
The Year of Snake — The Year of Krodhi
It was once the year of the Monkey,
now it is the year of the Snake,
The year of Krodhi Samvatsara —
The year that bites into our skin, our bones, deep within.
From it oozes the venom of pain, of karma,
of awakening, of memory—serving us right.
This year demands we question ourselves,
as it sees us walking blindfolded to the cries of war, poverty, narcissism.
The year of destruction — humanity, sensibilities, willpower —
with gunpowder and flarestrikes.
The year of words reaching us from decades,
The year I read Emily Dickinson:
“A little Madness in the Spring
Is wholesome even for the King,
But God be with the Clown —
Who ponders this tremendous scene — ”
The year of anarchy, of puppetry, of war —
a poisonous madness clutching the air,
drifting across every border.
The year you and I cannot separate ourselves
from those on the other side of the equator,
where the breath is also a gunpowder sting.
Like children,
I questioned what it means to be here, myself,
caught in the webs of adult words,
words of disarray, thrown at us like random pollen in the wind,
the self-probing, the blame
for failing to grasp the meaning.
The year we voted for inaction,
handing ropes to the manipulators,
the memory erasers.
The year we decided not to be political, socialist,
a philosopher—
The year we built machines, more powerful, more like us,
or so we thought—creations once unfathomable,
we kept rebuilding, unable to abandon them.
The year I read Picasso:
“Art is never finished, but abandoned.”
The year we let our narratives,
deliberate, planned
lies,
numb
the gutting cries through blasting fog,
ignorance, grief.
The year we let it all get lost amidst our own struggles and chaos,
the chaos that flows inside.
Everyone’s got their problems,
we whispered to the wind we shared with them, with no one, with ourselves.
Like the year before, and before,
and after, and after—
The year of hope, of compassion, of love.
The year calling for us to pause,
to listen to its sublime silence through the echoes
of all the conflicts and wars.
The year with scales of anger
scrawls with urgency,
wraps us, only
to slip by, slowly,
as our eyes stay glued shut.
