The dead will forever bind their miasma to your hair

will knot their shrouds to every hook in the house,
knead your nerves into a legato of sirens

Past the news of war, you socket your sleep in an echo
Between tonight’s sky — brocaded with tomorrow

And tomorrow, there will be the hour of war, creeping like a reptile
across the fields where two countries grow rice with their backs

to each other and fly kites this time of the year to welcome spring
Turning time to flesh

It is early spring, you too feel a tingle in your fingertips,
tremble a moment like a Shalimar cypress, but the masonry of your body

is recalled when warplanes come near, loved ones asleep
all around you. The dead will forever bind their miasma to your hair

And what the newscasters will later call aerial engagement
has been the flute song in your dream all along, chased

by steam engines, swooped up by MiG-21s, surface-to-air missiles
the pilot of the downed plane asks hysterically which country he is in. Which

way should he run? The air as sharp, the trees as majestic this side of the border.
As a prisoner of war, he is recorded saying, between sips

of tea, the officers of the Pakistani Army are thorough gentlemen.
He is nervous. The cup he holds is Raj-white, with a pale green bough,

vaguely Mughal in its vegetal flourish. The temperature in Islamabad is 11 degrees
Celsius, in Delhi it is 16. Yellow trumpet daffodils are blooming.

It is early spring.