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I am afraid of Muslims

 

I am afraid of Muslims

Christians unnerve and alarm me

Jews fill me with dread

I fear Hindus

I am terrified of Gautama’s followers

Scared of Nanak’s devotees

Science and art

Secularism and socialism

Capitalism, communism, commerce, civilization

Rattle and dismay me

 

An ominous firelight flares up in my brain

The moment I see a human figure

And I flee in terror

To deserts, forests, and hills

To rivers, lakes, and seas

To haunts of birds and beasts

The domains of fish and eels

Of sharks, dolphins, and whales

To worlds of insects and worms, and of all burrowing creatures

To realms of reptiles, serpents, and snakes

 

Contiguous worlds

Without rituals of aversion

Without philosophy, religion, law

Without affliction of private visions

Where no species inflicts its language on another

No species its lexicon, its call, its order, its practice

Where life itself is art, living, science

Contiguous worlds

Of simple sorrows, simple joys

Without raptures and ecstasies

Without gnawing of the vitals in envy and spite

Where pain does not devolve to depths of despair

Nor killing bloom into calamity no words may adequately contain

 

Contiguous worlds

Now turned into garbage bins, into litter pits

Into radioactive disposal dumps

In collective indifference

Contiguous worlds

To which malign effluents leach and spread irredeemably

Where the plant of infections and defilement pitches its roots deep into the earth’s core

Contiguous worlds

Invaded and annexed

Ruptured, and torn, and robbed

 

 

Look, look, I cry out

The stockpiles they have assembled

The toxic malice of their words and deeds

The malevolence of their contempt

The impunity of their depredations

The freedom of their slaughter

Oblivious to what is seeded

Oblivious to what they foment

Unmindful of ruin and havoc

Blind to the obliteration

They have prepared for themselves

 

But the plains smile and shake their heads

Deserts stretch out on their backs and snigger

Mountains, caverns, and rocks ring with laughter

And waters of the earth dissolve in wild guffaws

 

Waqas Khwaja

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