Kalashs Sapping Our Sap

Blurb: Kalash sapping our sap is a refugee week throwback poem by Charlotte Hourdin. Read it, and you will be thrown into a migrant’s journey, kindly rocked by a spun metaphor of natural displacement and rootlessness.

 

I used to plunge my calloused hands into fruitful soil 

As I would dig into my past, dive into my roots.

I used to crop dew-wet wheat with a sharpened scythe 

As Kalashs sliced my life into 

pieces. 

 

They disembowelled our environment,

Tore earth’s plants out of its ground,

each time draining us a bit more

of our liveliness,

Sapping our sap.

 

There was

No more fruitful soil,

No more feathery leaves.

 

I had

No more origins,

No more joyous progeny,

 

There was

Only dust and trumpet sound.

Trumpet countdown.

What did I say? Oh no sorry I meant bullet sound.

Bullet countdown. Our daily music.

Our daily morning music, our daily noon music, our daily evening music.

 

I left

With only an empty bundle full of hope. 

I had to hide, to run, to lie, to buy.

I was captured and freed.

 

‘Till a sweet hand 

Sprang up and took me to her land. 

It was layered with past bullet sound 

But the upper crust was fresh and fertile.

 

I try to learn how they grow crops here,

I try to learn how they use their tongues to make their clatter intelligible.  

 

But it still sounds like 

BULLET CLANG

to me. 

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