Poem

Extinction

Yogesh Patel

Happiness is a flower
It doesn’t bloom in the sea
It blooms in my heart
The sea of joy itself

A concept of revenge
Is in your mind, in your novels
In your harpoons, in your lies

Whale research is not a research of love
The shores of Faroe are not farms
When your child is dismembered
Wailing and crying, cut alive
A mother too getting harpooned
For someone else’s feast
Happiness parades two faces
A grey suit and a white robe

The temples tolling the bells
And words inscribed on the tables
Are not the redemptions
Just as a terror of a crab
Taped and wrapped in a cling film
Tight, in total pain, in panics
On Korean shop shelf

Eaten and forgotten
Happiness is expunged
The mother and a calf
Are a flower crushed

When I am extinct
Go to the shores
A happiness that breaches from the sea
Will be a whale

The tablets are
The words on sand
Not poems.