I. Morning in Kolkata
The haze lies upon the city at twenty-eight degrees,
a veil neither of heaven nor of earth
but of that uncertain country between them
where prayers dissolve before they reach the rooftops.
I have seen this haze before:
in the eyes of men who sign their names to truces
while their cannons still speak in tongues of fire.
They tell me America and Iran have agreed to pause,
that the Strait of Hormuz shall let the oil tankers pass
like pilgrims through the needle's eye of peace.
But already the ink is quarrelled over,
already Lebanon burns at the margins of the contract,
and I wonder: is a ceasefire that no one believes
not simply war wearing the white garment of a saint?
O my world, you have learned the art of the truce
but forgotten the discipline of trust.
II. The Easter Silence
Now from the fields of Ukraine comes word
that the guns shall sleep for thirty-two hours,
a rest for Orthodox Easter,
as if Christ could be resurrected
only in the silence between bombardments.
Putin speaks of the holy day.
Zelensky answers with a careful yes.
And the soldiers on both sides
shall lay down their rifles and remember
that the earth beneath them is the same earth,
that the bread they break is kneaded from the same wheat.
I do not mock this pause.
Even the river rests in the still pool
before it plunges over the falls.
But I pray: let this silence grow ambitious,
let it stretch beyond the bells of Sunday
into Monday, into the ordinary days
where peace must learn to walk without a festival.
III. The Voices They Cannot Burn
In Moscow they have raided the newspaper office,
they have outlawed the human rights circle
whose leaders wear the Nobel medal like a target on their chests.
And in the north of Nigeria,
young women write love stories on their telephones:
erotic, bold, serialised on WhatsApp,
while the censors prowl and the zealots burn
the paperback romances of their mothers' generation.
See how the word refuses to be silenced!
It slips between the fingers of the censor
like water through a fist.
It finds new channels: digital, invisible, intimate.
And the young women laugh in their rooms,
composing paragraphs of desire
that no committee of old men can confiscate.
This is the oldest war and the oldest victory:
the tongue against the gag,
the pen against the decree,
the whispered story against the shouted law.
IV. What the Chimpanzees Know
In Uganda's Kibale forest,
a community of chimpanzees has turned upon itself:
a civil war, the scientists say,
coordinated, deliberate, brutal.
And I, who once wrote that the world
puts out its total call to each new child,
must sit with this news like a stone in my lap.
Are we then nothing more than what they are?
Is the impulse to divide, to fracture the familiar,
written so deeply in the blood
that even our nearest cousins rehearse our darkest scenes?
No. I will not surrender to that reading.
For the chimpanzee does not write a truce for Easter.
The chimpanzee does not send its young women
to compose forbidden stories of tenderness.
We are the creature that names its cruelty
and then, sometimes (not always, but sometimes)
chooses otherwise.
V. The Moon Travellers Return
Four astronauts descend from the vicinity of the moon,
carrying photographs and stones and stories.
"All the good stuff," they say,
as if the cosmos were a marketplace
and they had bargained well.
I confess I am moved.
Not by the technology, which I cannot pretend to understand,
but by the impulse: the same impulse
that sent the first boats down the Ganges,
the same restlessness that builds temples and telescopes alike.
They have walked where no footprint lasts,
where the dust remembers nothing,
and they return to an earth
that cannot agree on the borders of its own continents.
What faith! To voyage outward
while the home burns with its old familiar fires.
Perhaps that is not contradiction but necessity:
the eye must sometimes look up
so the heart does not drown in looking down.
VI. The Glaciers and the Miners
In Argentina they have passed a law
to mine the glaciers of the Andes,
to break the frozen cathedrals of ten thousand years
for the metals sleeping in their bones.
I have stood beside the Himalayas
and known the glacier as a scripture
written in the language of patience.
What will we say to the river
when its source has been sold to the smelter?
What will we say to the children
who inherit a mountain with a hollow chest?
The protesters march in Buenos Aires.
The president signs with a libertarian flourish.
And the ice, which has no vote and no lobby,
continues its ancient, accelerating retreat.
VII. Evening Prayer
The haze has not lifted.
Twenty-eight degrees, and the crows
settle on the telegraph wires
like notes on a musical staff
that no one has yet learned to read.
I am old: older than nations,
older than the ceasefire and the war it interrupts,
older than the submarine that skulks
beneath the British waves, gathering secrets
from the cables on the ocean floor.
But I am not too old for hope.
Hope is not the certainty that things improve.
Hope is the woman in Caracas
who walks into the tear gas
demanding a wage she can live on.
Hope is the astronaut who packs a camera
for a journey of four hundred thousand kilometres.
Hope is the young writer in Kano
who presses "send" on a chapter
that the authorities have forbidden her to dream.
The haze will lift, or it will not.
The ceasefire will hold, or it will not.
But the song, the stubborn, unkillable song,
goes on.
