Poem of the Day
Yellow Striped Pajamas
By Shamsher Bahadur Singh
walking silently on his paws, he emerges from the semidarkness and disappears into it.
walking silently on his paws, he emerges from the semidarkness and disappears into it.
i.
Now these were the embarkations they made to the holy places of egypt sinai
palestine and syria in the years of furies 1916–17 unto the last 1918. Godspeed under the schoolyard’s cherry tree scrawled his anabasis marred by dust and the red smell of the sea.
ii.
Disembarked for alexandria shuck camp and enchained at moascar and proceeded to el
ferdan where it dechained and proceeded to reduit camp where it encamped and took over duties and post defenses in the sun.
iii.
And was shuck off the strength accordingly. england. Heavy-clouded. That was the month of
the death of the late Field Marshal Right Honourable H. H. Earl Kitchener of Khartoum K.G. G.C.B. O.M. G.C.S.I. G.C.M.G. G.C.I.E. Colonel Commandant Royal Engineers Colonel Irish Guards Secretary of State for war that for a period of one week officers of the army shall wear mourning with their uniforms on this melancholy occasion. The boy wiped cherry on his lionized shirt in bad faith.
They talk oil in heavy jackets and plaid over
their coffee, they talk Texas and the north cold,
As I ride my bicycle home from work at sunrise
a young fellow with an upturned collar asks me for my “spare change.”
He is friendly, as if we were classmates meeting in the schoolyard.
Inside the head there lives a lonely dog
It is drooling spit
digging through a mountain pile of garbage
Which we will never stop reading
Which is inked in no-color and dust
My steeds live for War.
My swords are not for show.
My colt’s trained not to stop
Now that we have ordered well may we turn back
upon suffering; after the fixed moments and precision,
to seek comfort in release. Peace being with us,
I am about to close my refrigerator after removing a package of meat when I hear my door lock turning and a crew of men, without so much as first knocking, walk in.
Then I will live a long and exciting life, simply by standing upright.
I dream I hurl a spear into the body of my love. I am brutal, but the spear begins to glow along its shaft and transfixes me. I stand covered in its radiance, unable to move, magnetized towards the spear that I reach out to touch and then grasp and stroke and carry myself forward along its length until I have touched the body of my love itself at the point where the spear has entered. I sob, I shake in convulsions and the body of my love bends forward to comfort me as I support myself against it in a paroxysm of leaving my body.