I am a war poem written in blood that has dripped and set in the mud, buried like a seed never to sprout, feeding the trees, blooming as flowers. I mushroom like a bullet I deposit on the skin like gunshot residue. I hide in the camouflaged uniforms. I beat in the hearts of the soldiers trying to keep the rhythm calm. Sometimes I walk through the battlefield, sometimes the battlefield walks through me. I am the sound of cannon fire. I am the fear, I am the longing. I am the smell of starch in midst of the squalor. I wish to be not written, to be extinct. Yet I am that souvenir lodged in your bone. I wish instead to be uttered not with remorse not with valor but a testament to peace, to be sung as a song of doves, a poem of pacifists.
Akshaya Pawaskar is a doctor practicing in Goa, India, and poetry is her passion. Her poems have been published in Tipton Poetry Journal, Shards, The Blue Nib, North of Oxford, Indian Rumination, Rock and Sling, among many others. She won the Craven Arts Council ekphrastic poetry competition in 2020 and was placed second in The Blue Nib chapbook contest in 2018. Her first solo poetry chapbook ‘The falling in and the falling out’ was published by Alien Buddha press in January 2021.
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