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Jayant Kashyap

For some,

the very worst thing has happened.

— Jessica Traynor, ‘Ophelia in Ballybough’

The last of the men who’d seen the second

World War are now dying—this thing to do with

having only so much time on earth.

They wrote letters to their wives and their

would-be wives and their never-to-be wives;

nobody broke the other’s heart during the War—

in the archives, we’ve credited all the vandalism

to death, as if a creature of intent, as if

personified.

*

Sometimes, I’d ask my mother what she knew

about the War and she’d say she’d known

—as a child—the aftereffects;

that my grandfather, her father-in-law, had lived

through it—himself a child—that India

was no more than an image of ruin

despite the absolute distance from the War;

that when they said the sun never set

on the British Empire, it was that ‘even God did-

n’t trust the English in the dark.’ That Churchill

decided it would be famine only if Gandhi—

that skinny, brown, unruly set of bones

with a stick—died. Only years ago,

even at the age of 61 he’d

walked 400 kilometres to imply disobedience.

*

Years later, when mother died, we’d stopped

taking walks in the evening, since it meant cele-

bration, and it was anything but—

*

That if love is not hagiography, what is—

JAYANT KASHYAP, the author of the pamphlets Unaccomplished Cities and Survival, will publish his New Poets Prize-winning third pamphlet, Notes on Burials, with smith|doorstop in 2025.