Poems by Adil Jussawalla 

Our Convict 
​
Now it has found us it feeds,
no longer unfed. Sentenced to life
only in beasts,
it has us now for bread.
 
It did not strike while we were sleeping.
Break-ins and dinings were easy, so were its flames.
They spread.
We called it names we soon dropped as it altered disguise
to enter us undetected,
kill the surprised.
 
O armed sharp-shooters still standing
needles in hand, on frontiers breached or deserted,
and you, glum trackers of what keeps escaping your watch,
your enforcements, the names you create
to crown its success,
take, instead, my shot
It’s the convict our planet once sentenced,
the orphan that never forgot.

​Guardian 
​
Bright familiar face
painted above an archway
somewhere I’ve forgotten— 
that abbey in Milan
or Florentine recess— 
you give yourself away.
 
You’re from that sunken place
kept for those made jobless,
the wards assigned to you
escaped to live regardless,
unguarded, free, unsafe.
 
How did you get out
to sign the fresh contract
that gave you us to guard
through baffling wilderness,
lost forgotten face?
 
You give yourself away:
those exit holes of feathers,
your borrowed unsure gait.
 

Adil Jussawalla was born in Bombay in 1940. He is the author of six books of poems and two chapbooks. In 2014, he won the Sahitya Akademi Award for his poetry collection Trying to Say Goodbye. He lives in Mumbai.
 
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