Sounding Bugles

Tonight’s moon will be heat-throttled;
my father’s slow-turning eye watches
the rising reformation of our country’s
people—the ones with more bread less than
equal to the ones that learn they can survive
hunger with a special kind of tobacco
pressed between the teeth and cheek,
the kind that acclimates with blood. Grief is
malleable in skilled hands; soon children
for whom school is a visit either to a future
or a means to learn, furthermore, the way
to escape the need for alternate food, mining
the grounds of their minds with comic strips,
become the intellectual whose arms are
muted under grinding a balance between
logical escape and patriotic leisure. But the heat
is rising; the bated night is luminous, bands
of clouds invisible, like homes of dreams
lacing fragile exteriors. Our voice is ground for
debt, that is like delayed prayer shot from
a freshly oiled barrel; tonight the moon will watch
fireworks going off on a rich man’s terrace
resembling broken dawns. Opinion is didactic
in skilled hands. My father shall recognise
the sounds through his impaired hearing,
drink enough water to fill to the brim of
his stomach, turn off the touting reforms
and wait in his sleep for the next prayer.

© 2019, Sheikha A.