History Said

BY SATAKSHI GUPTA

Thoughts of time cage my mind
Words catapult me to ancient texts from past lives
How will they write this?
How will they interpret it when they find this?
Will the patois of neglected reflect in the tales of the romantics?
When will consequentiality be too little to forgive maleficent intentions?

I'd swallow history chapters from vials like failsafe
Now I wonder if the author was paid to twist the tale
I overturn epic poetries - Dante's Inferno and Homer's Odyssey
The greatest of them of all, the Mahabharata, a classified myth
I wonder how it exists
Who found it on the shores of the Arabian sea?

If truth is perceptive and time is money
I wonder how they will write our story
Who burned us down?
Who invented air on settlers planet when it was found?
Who wringed the carcass for blood to be sold for cash?
Whether power was gluttonous or was it the poor's greedy head?

In my failures to daub colors on a canvas
I recognize the stain on my imagination
I only seem to dream of things I read behind a glass
Of a white walled palace crawling with coats and lapel pins
Committing arson at a dumpster site in a third world country
Where lie burning an endless stream of similarly specific things
To use and throw, to consume then waste
For clicks and likes, to share and subscribe

When land succumbs to tidal waves
I wonder if the remnants of Columbus' crew will plague the ocean like relics
As streams of currency wade through stars from the exhaust of spaceships
Hunters descends on pristine lands chanting power is pious
Spitting image of the aliens they build a dome to protect themselves

When heat melts on our tongues and skin evaporates
Who will be left behind to write of the ghostly scenes?
Who will be left to fend for themselves?
Who will be left for dead?

This mind implores
Who will write the history then?
After cellphones have erased cultures
And stateless beings are starved by the regime
When all meaning is lost in translation from vernacular to standardized text
When all art is funded by museums redolent of expense
Will inequity find justice? Will allies switch sides?
Will etymology play charades, change the meaning of arts and its patrons?

This writer implores
If dissent is dissolved in false promises of perpetual prosperity
Whose history is real? theirs from the top or mine from the margins?
If silencing screams is child's play, is anything written valuable or is it all printed on government's dime?

Thoughts of time transcend my mind
If past can be penned with false ink
And future is always out of grasp
Then time is just a construct
Seems the only acceptable conclusion
Present is the only reality
Was said by me with finality
But who's to say this wasn't censored?
Who's to say this poem was written with unquestionable veracity?