In spring, in the city
your father sought to make
his own, in his borrowed
cotton trousers, money lender’s
coins jangling in his pockets,
a long time before sandstone columns
rose like tridents
on either side of the new boulevard,
in the streets he left behind
to enlist, to learn to bayonet charge
the traitors of his tribe,
in the unwiped smudges
of the stubble smog,
in the bask of mint-new names
for his strange old city,
did you visit the black stones
of the martyr’s tomb?
Did you push your toes
into the loamy earth
of the Mughal Gardens?