This World is Full of Silences — Three Poems by Khushi Mohunta

I was taught
to write in English.
To press words into form
like linen between palms,
crease-less.
Safe.

I was never taught
the language of ash,
the sound a name makes
as it disappears
from a register.

When a boy vanishes
on his walk to school,
how does his mother
say grief?

Is it in the same accent
with which I say grief
in workshop poems?
Or is it
another sound entirely —
one that doesn’t ask
to be understood?

There are alphabets
that burn in the throat.
I write in the one
that never does.

And this is how silence wins –
not with guns,
but with grammar.

You didn’t gather
on the footpath with others.
You didn’t light a candle.
You didn’t hold up
a poster with the child’s name.

You kept your door shut.
Fed your son early.
Tucked him into silence.
You swept the corridor
twice that week.

You say:
The world doesn’t bend
for protest.
It snaps.

And I
believe you.

You have lived longer
than anyone with a placard.
But still —
I cannot
unsee
your eyes
the moment
the girl’s body
was found.

Not dry.
Not angry.
Just wide —
like a question
you never dared
to ask aloud.

Grief, I’m learning
is sometimes a locked room
with no windows —
just one woman
folding laundry
in the dark.

This poem will not
ease the burden of the dead.
It will not prevent
a knock at midnight.

It cannot dissolve
tear gas, or policy.
It cannot make a mother
un-identify her son.
But it can say:
I saw what you tried
to cover.

It can name
what was unnamed.
It can bear witness
to the softness
that violence leaves behind —
a footprint in milk.

I do not write to save.
I write because silence
makes things worse.

Because someone must
record the unremarked.
Because if no one writes it,
they will say
it never happened.

And because poems
are not weapons –
but they are the maps
we leave behind
for when someone
wants to return
to the truth.