Rear-View Mirror

(For the prompt: History will be the judge)

***
Will she judge us harshly? The girl
reading about us in her textbook?
Will every child killed, every child

maimed, every species lost, every
coast eroded, every weapon, every
pump jack, every gigaton of carbon

emitted be an indictment? And later,
much later, will we morph from history
to evil myth? The race banished from

paradise? The people who dared the
gods? The greed that laid waste to
a land? But history wears all kinds of

spectacles. What do we remember?
How much do we choose to forget?
Forgive? Erase? I think of blue sea

and orange horizon, of red gulmohar
and yellow copper pods dropping
on asphalt like sacred rain, of walking

on crisp mornings between hundred-
year-old trees, of hearing bulbuls and
koels and watching mynahs, their

beaks dipping in and out of the fiery
African tulips. I wonder if the textbook
will also say that for a while, like the

shade inside a poem, like a universe
enjambed, eyes and heart and lips
moving from line to line, till the quiet

at the end of the last word of the last
verse — will it say, for a while, before
the madness, despite the madness,

before the apocalypse, there was also
this? Why is the past always murkier
than it seems in the rear-view mirror?

***

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#April2024 24/30