They trooped through the squinting light, perched down across the dry earth
facing the burst of heat hanging over Jallianwala Bagh.
Words plucked the air, rifles clacked and corrected their aim,
as men, women, and children turned to see, their own people
staring back at them with violence on their lips, violence held in the palm of their coiled hands.
There stood the Lieutenant Colonel, and he cried havoc with a sharp bark,
and bullets chewed the Vaisakhi heat, and the blood of Indians
began to spit and detonate across the shredded air, barely suppressing the quilt of screams.
(Reload-Fire-Reload-Fire)
Then bodies burst through bodies to break free, bolting past the other,
to the gate, to the wall, to the well, to underneath those fortunate enough to die faster.
No escape. Nowhere to turn. Backwards, forwards, sideways, met by bullet fire.
The throat of the spit-dry well opened, then swallowed up
the contorted corpses that flew in to escape; others crouching to hide from the blitz.
(Reload-Fire-Reload-Fire)
Swiftly did he turn, General Dyer pirouetting on his heels, as did his far too loyal sepoys;
the air sat pregnant with scarcely withheld violence, the scorched earth
clawed back by fear-bitten fingernails, that clung more desperately,
onto the mounds of blood-pitted dirt, some clasping spent cartridges, left smoldering.
Dogs soon lapped at the lakes of glossy blood, vultures hooked themselves around
the afternoon, snow white clouds, and plunged deeper,
to gnaw free the contents of an open eye socket or a hundred.
And Indian blood dotted the bleached walls, and the bodies that did crawl,
from one to the other, past kith and kin, eventually had two choices:
Give up the fight.
Play dead.
And the permanence of impending gunfire still clung to the Punjab skyline, as the sound
of the demons trotted off into the whip snap of curling time. It was Sunday.
