FLOODLIGHTS
Winged creatures dazzle night sky,
illuminated Japanese sea crabs,
leg spans four metres wide,
in flight and oceanless.
This is my dream of kiamat,
Muslim school-educated endtimes—
the earth expels its bowels,
frantically, rings of volcanoes
shudder their violent excrement, holy fire,
onto the earth so ash clouds
may cool it. Darling oh darling, we say
to each other, Oh sweetling, oh
may it all be enough to stop this boil.
Furious marine life steps out of
roiling maritime, flies flung-out into the air,
stratosphere deluged with the last
of blue whales, the pockmarked grey of
coral reefs’ corpses, rickety flotsam,
gone in such few years by Earth’s watch.
All of the sentient sea is airborne,
haloed in a whitish-blue, luminaries.
I will hold up your hand and wave it
to the cephalopods, changing colour
as they hit the smokestacks’ fury of ash,
their arms swathed deep in cerulean glow.
I wish, you’ll whisper, and one will point
two tentacles out towards you as if to say—
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTOR
KHAIRANI BAROKKA is a Minang-Javanese writer and artist from Jakarta, now based in London, whose work is presented widely internationally. Among Okka’s honours, she has been MODERN POETRY IN TRANSLATION’s Inaugural Writer-in-Residence and Associate Artist at the UK’s National Centre for Writing. Centering disability justice as anticolonial praxis, her works includes her most recent book ULTIMATUM ORANGUTAN (Nine Arches), shortlisted for the Barbellion Prize.
Source: TWO POEMS – The White Review