The Expulsion

For there is a time in the tide of the heart, when [...] we ask, O God, where is our home?

— Derek Walcott

That summer, the locusts coughed red dust.

Packing house, off the sofa’s gridiron,

I wiped limp afternoons, matte spatter of soup

knocked by my childish elbows diving first for the TV remote,

silt of arguments, years Father hollered

to Maradona’s instep kick. Father, who shivered

desert storms to a whisper each time he hummed

for us aaj mausam bara beimann hae

bara beiman hae, aaj mausam.

Father, like the sea, an expatriate

that moves behooved despite

the country’s covert disposals.

Father, who tucked our passports close, a prosthesis.

Father at whom two men cocked

a gun, trawling the house for his work permit.

Their fingers leeched each ventral

dimness with blame. Those nights, I watched him

through the parted doorway, its narcotic eye

blearing the hooded lamps. His shoulders

simmered antennal to hazard.

His cleaved forehead, like the frontier

that threshed us back to this native land,

its grease, & gangly boys who beggar

bagged goldfish that eye me obliquely from plump neon waters.

Most days, as Father idles the hour content

as a windblown shack,

I pendulate, thick with rot. Superfluous,

my reluctant music of leaving, and my lie:

yes, we left, how we hated the weather.

What happens when we snipe truth, its hair-narrow bridge?

What happens when we spill fictions?

Belonging, once terra firma, crumbles to smoke.

I, mongrel. I dog the city’s last engine

droning home. The red eye that blinks blinks

at the billboards’ insomnia. All night,

over huddled rooftops, the koel vibrates, irking

the sleeping hopes of larvae. Supine, shirtless

laborers snore into the puckered moisture. Father

flicks past the news, like the news. How pathetic,

I think, how much like greed,

in these damp enervations, my private alphabet of loss.

*The phrases "hopes of larvae" and damp enervations are from Derek Walcott.