Why must your skies be bright blue,
while ours covered in this thick black smog?
Why must gazillions of stars come to grace your skies,
while we lay beneath the starless skies on the footpath?
Why must you have lavish lawns,
while by the dawn, trees around us go missing, get knocked down?
With the trees gone, branches gone, birds are seen seldom, if at all.
Mute mornings await us each day.
No longer are birds heard chirping their songs.
With no birds, no trees, no stars, nor the skies,
we are left with this piece of paper and pen,
so we do what we must,
we write.
Prerna Bakshi is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and the author of Burnt Rotis, With Love, a debut full-length collection of poetry from Les Éditions du Zaporogue (Denmark), long-listed for the 2015 Erbacce-Press Poetry Award in the UK and cited as one of the ‘9 Poetry Collections That Will Change The Way You See The World’ by Bustle Magazine in the US. Her work has been published widely, most recently in The Ofi Press, Red Wedge Magazine, TRIVIA: Voices of Feminism and Prachya Review: Literature & Art Without Borders. This poem first appeared in Red Wedge Magazine.
