49: shorelines

shorelines Asher Ghaffar

ii. His name is

Barkatullah

bespectacled, towering, a book under his arm

fired from his teaching post in Tokyo for a newspaper banned before it reached India 5 that same year that he boards the ship

and likely never steps on the shore

adrift his whole life,

but immaculate like an axe blade pitched into sand.

i. lift your eyes

from the shoreline to the blue so your vision becomes tremulous

He stands at the rail already knowing this is a failed mission,

I know him through a coincidence of relations — two bodies separated by the diurnal pattern of foghorns

ghadr

say it slow

three blasts from the ship three blasts answered by a hand-pumped horn at Point Atkinson

so as not to make it sound like

treachery

a signal built from a lighthouse built that year in concrete,

HINDU INVADERS NOW IN THE CITY HARBOUR 2

a word that travels, port to port without landing in Urdu — in Hindi ghadar revolt — mutiny tracing back to 1857

and another approaching boat, the Sea Lion the passengers answering with coal

with fire bricks with scrap iron

documented as souls in a parish register, Hindoos in the official record from Hindustan?

compressed there into meaning, in bodies, into lore that still lives in Old Delhi.

no column for her

Carman writes in Connecticut, 1914 —

Before shorelines become swallowed

“This is May coming now, With the blushing apple bough; And her swallows skim and circle Where the heavy oxen plow.” 3

by the uncertainty of gunfire,

and the certainty of being.

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