"Do you have an ID?"
The officer asked at the checkpoint's divide,
A question that twists like a splinter inside.
It shatters the lock where my memories hide,
And spills out a scene from a long-faded tide.
A taste of old salt, a sorrowful plea,
A ghost of the person I used to be.
Memories clinging, refusing to fade,
Whispering names my own history made.
"Do you have an ID?"
But which identity do you want?
The one I select?
The assigned one?
The name on the file to inspect?
The box to be checked with a cold, formal pen?
Or the one from a time that will not come again?
The one before the blue-eyed reached the sand,
Dragging heavy lead across the land.
With a ruler's cruel stroke a continent cleaved,
And people were severed, their history thieved.
They just left the order, a permanent scar
Now known as "Border."
and instead of shade trees, we learned the trade of war,
And a paper grew thicker than blood was before.
How about the whole, the unbroken ideal?
The memory of shade, so calming and real?
The taste of the tea, from a time we could trust,
Before it grew bitter with gunpowder dust?
Or perhaps the one forged in the fire that followed?
A future of pain in a present left hollowed?
The one born when thieves on a screaming metal tank,
Broke into our home, leaving everything blank.
They fractured our doorways—and crushed the Neem trees,
And left phantoms of laughter
And a crushed cold zeer.
Then a white unmarked car
Searched every mattress seam
For dollars rebelling against the new regime.
So I grabbed the other me
who ran so free,
And turned the lock where only I could see.
He beats on the walls where the joy once played,
And I swallowed the key
so the silence stayed.
"Do you have an ID?"
"Do I...?"
But my passport speaks of a land you'll never see.
The accent you hear is the map of a place
That lives in the lines of a tired face.
My culture's a mosaic—cracked and pieced,
From borrowed rites and temporary feasts.
My chapters were penned on the wind as it blew
Across foreign cities I briefly passed through.
Each memory founded on ground that could shift,
A temporary solace, a parting gift.
You learn a new language, a tongue made of stone,
The syntax of silence, the comfort of 'alone.'
There once was a time I held papers with pride,
Clung to that name as a shield and a creed.
I returned to that homeland, my soul full of scars,
Believing its earth could extinguish the wars.
But the promise I searched for had curdled with pain,
Leaving nothing but bitterness, a venomous stain.
They drowned their best children to wash the land clean,
And made our old river a funeral scene.
The nation we dreamed of… the one we held dear?
Its children had bled it and left it right here.
A body abandoned for vultures to see.
So the love I held for homeland, myth, and pride—
Was the final thing that had to die inside.
And then the traitor emerged—unveiled,
To hang the love for a nation that failed.
He called it a mercy to kick the stool
From beneath what cannot be saved.
Either this, or stay forever enslaved.
Slowly erased.
"Do you have an ID?"
I look at the officer,
The gun, the line.
I nod.
I say, "Yes."
And hand him
The lie.