The Jeet Thayil poem they wouldn’t publish because it’s ‘too explicitly political’

Editor’s note Award winning novelist, poet and musician Jeet Thayil says this poem was rejected by a literary and cultural magazine for being too political. We told him we’d be happy to run it.  WapsiBy Jeet ThayilOn television the new warblares, we sick bitches lickour wounds and try to recuperate,cow logic, cowed rhetoric,cowardly assassinations replicatethe ways god dons armor in India, in twenty fifteen.The earth picks at its scabs,old wounds made fresh,children crawl backward like crabsto the cradle, no light, no progress,only a cleansing of the unclean as defined by the Prime Minister’s fringemasters. His beard drips grammarthis morning, and though his fistpumps properly for the camera,he has lost faith in his tryst,his destiny, his own words make him cringe and grieve for the gone world, the greattransformation wrought on the past,the sly erasure of names — Nehru,Gandhi, Ambedkar — history recastfor the age of holy terror,the tolerant taught to hate. Why measure time with wordswhen word is met with violence?How tame, how lame this linemet with silence,how useless its meter and rhyme,better far to speak to the birds whose voices grow in panic or pityas man’s horizon narrowswith his understanding and the sunshrinks to a tight band of poroussaffron loud enough to stuneven him, the silent all-seeing deity.