One Day

By Smitha Sehgal

You will step out of your home
And find corpses of little dolls strewn in the garden
The pavement, sidewalk, streets, lifts, subways, trams, metros, gutters, manholes
Those plastic faces, the shine of the apple of cheek
Smeared with the dirt of your guilt
Heads half severed, mutilated limbs
Dangling from electric poles, branches of surviving trees
Their eyes mauled,
Tongue blue, rhymes frozen in them
Crushed on the zebra crossing like insects
Little frock and pinafore torn
Hair a mass of filth where flies rummage for remnants of sticky candies
You will stoop down to gather the frayed pieces like a scavenger
Cart away the mangled flesh ripped apart and left to rot,
Beneath the heap of those corpses, there might be a possibility
Of finding a little heart beating fast
Crouching in fear

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