POEM FOR JOSEPH

"It is never too late to come home." But I need a homeland where I can recognize myself, just a map or even a tree or a stone, to mark a spot I could return to like a pissing animal even when there's nothing to return for. Although it's true that in my native land, children have crawled out of burrows they had gouged under hard beds, long after the grownups had fled and roofs came apart like charred heads. You said, you didn't regret how ethnic cleansers had palmed your newly-built home off on a people well on their trail back to pure blood, you didn't mind leaving behind objects of desire you had collected over twenty-five years, or, how you came to live in a rented room with your wife and your children in dog-eat-dog Imphal, among the callous tribe I call my own. Only the photographs you mourned, the beloved sepia of one family tree, since you're the reason why your fathers lived; but, who'll believe now that you lived at all?