‘Shower us with money / plants and other organic air purifiers’: Prayers during a smoggy Diwali

Haze Lit

The sun’s a ghostly galleon
lost among leucistic crows
in a sky learning a new shade
of apology as it soft-focuses
the spaces between towers,
and flyovers forget where they begin,
like a wish I once cast
into a murky wave
when I still believed I could fly
with seagulls in a weightless dream.

The hills and towns
carry on trade in AQI apps
the colour of a parakeet’s beak
I set my lungs to manual,
counting breath,
breath-holding less verb more adjective,
each breath a negotiation
on a cracked pavement
where leopard and chital sit
together rubbing their eyes.
Masks eat the faces of morning
joggers, the kingfisher openly hides
from the kite, a child is warned
not to run outdoors happily
as if joy itself were particulate.

…not into the air that is a sponge
for our burning wishes,
our fashionable haste,
our faith in later.

…not into an air that is bruise
and bruiser. I excuse myself
from deeply sighing, avoidance
tactic for that metallic aftertaste,
as if stilling the bellows of emotion
might spare my veins purpling
like a fallen peacock feather.

Somewhere parliament meets
hooting promises that stand
on careful phrasing
that new policy will arrive on a shining
horse telling me that our bison don’t
need to shop for purifiers
lugging one room to room
like an external lung
humming with surrender in a corner
and once again the razor edges
of palm leaves, the unapologetic curves
of clouds will step out to proclaim
that I can trust the world enough

on my skin, that transparency will return
to a tomorrow where emotions
aren’t rationed like oxygen
and the elephants and I
don’t deviate from tribal pathways –
of breath, of...

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