Dinshaway, 27th June 1906

I’ve never been to Dinshaway, some places

are like that, unvisited, widely unknown;

but when their names are taken, a line of faces

hovers over memory, as if they’re my own.

Perhaps I was among the flock of pigeons

which took the bullets for the soldiers’ sport;

I was the burnt grain; the trailing smidgen 

of smoke, the shock at the sentence of the court.

Maybe I was the wood that got hammered -

unwillingly nailed into the scaffold;

the mother’s final lament; the child’s last word;

the crowd’s last gasp at the rope’s stranglehold.

Not the key, nevertheless, a witness;

I was there when the bodies twitched, lifeless.

This is, in a way, a response poem to Cavafy's 27th June, 2 p.m. In another, it's a response to an old news story that feels like a recollection, dredged up from the deepest layers of deja vu-ness.  An 'incident' that sowed the seeds of a different Brexit. It slotted into me like a missing link of memory the first time I heard it; and it continues to move me, no doubt because there are very similar tales from pre-independent India.  I mean, that must be the rational explanation.