Ten Bullets And More

Maybe ten bullets, one for each,
were all it took to rapture
the bloodstream of ten veins
but the ten Hmar bloodstreams
that were punctured in Jiribam,
the boiling of my own bloodstream—
a Hmar bloodstream tells me,
it took more. It took more bullets than ten
for each, for all the ten Hmar bloodstreams.

The emptied bullet shells of that day
will go rusting in no time and maybe
the horrendous day itself,
when it all happened, might be forgotten
but never, never, never will the names
of the ten and their cause.
Because their death was so, so that
by tomorrow, the blood that they died for
will continue to flow in these hills.