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.   Wapsi By Jeet Thayil On television the new war blares, we sick bitches lick our wounds and try to recuperate, cow logic, cowed rhetoric, cowardly assassinations replicate the ways god dons armor   in India, in twenty fifteen. The earth picks at its scabs, old wounds made fresh, children crawl backward like crabs to the cradle, no light, no progress, only a cleansing of the unclean   as defined by the Prime Minister’s fringe masters. His beard drips grammar this morning, and though his fist pumps 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 great transformation wrought on the past, the sly erasure of names — Nehru, Gandhi, Ambedkar — history recast for the age of holy terror, the tolerant taught to hate.   Why measure time with words when word is met with violence? How tame, how lame this line met with silence, how useless its meter and rhyme, better far to speak to the birds   whose voices grow in panic or pity as man’s horizon narrows with his understanding and the sun shrinks to a tight band of porous saffron loud enough to stun even him, the silent all-seeing deity.