Post Scrotum: A Poem

Abstract

Post Scrotum Alamgir Hashmi Post Scrotum Watt? Yes. But the same when the Mal’oun died in the island; this island severed, repousse, reeling with peat-reek; this drizzle of grief— interminable falling on the wide sea. Moll’s face saffron-coloured, hair like petals plucked from a white chrysanthemum; local boys on stout or busy at hurling; and our scriveners, on regular beat up in London, aping accents of the English gentry. I broadcast in Irish then, from Radio Eireann, the right embers and all that fall to the ashes or whatever I often whispered to myself through Murphy, Philips, or Grundig. No, not Grundig, for the word grounds the air, the mind slips out of form in that language, is not hand in glove as now. Example: with a handschuh your hands feel they wear shoes; the foot’s in the mouth; and you write with your feet. Paris is O. K. Paris is all right. Paris is O. K. All right. I was lecteur d’anglais in that place, teaching Doublin’ English and writing like Thom A. Becket what no one, except J. J. in some arseholy state or other, would attempt— in a language of my own. I hear now that across the Chunnel one side tells the other it’s French I wrote; the other side calls it English, or by other appelatives; such as would divide the protestant cake in catholic portions and make for a nice debate in the Parliament of European Foules. If I said Parnell was no string-pulling politician, women would be tightening the girth of their drawers with double-knotted strings. I left because truelove had run out of the vein, the earth turning no end but negative; its slow poisons free a sweet violet in my lungs. And, yes, French had a point or two. That dusty potato dropped in 1921 or 1845, it named the apple of the earth— to say nothing of the rotten core. Peeling. Peeling. Alamgir Hashmi Islamabad, Pakistan Copyright © 1991 Alamgir Hashmi