| Weekly Feature |
The Shuttlecock in My Shelf
by Aditya Shankar
Is a descendant of the archaeopteryx.
Winged, but not yet a bird.
Rounded, but not yet a ball.
Bloomed like a flower,
but not yet a trove of honey or aroma.
Pointed like a needle, but not yet
a tooth or a thorn or a porcupine.
The translation of its shape reads
eagerness to adapt.
It trains with my dad to fly above nets,
to land in the half of failure.
Seasoned with whacks,
it can cope well in a cruel human setup.
At the dead end of a box,
a shuttle lives with folded wings
and identifies well with those
banished to the ghetto.
A colony or stack of them is
a prototype of the bewildered human line
yet to figure out its true purpose.
Say the traffic line,
the unemployment line,
the citizenship line.
A shuttle
isn’t an official creature of any nation
though its silence is
the official language of slaves.
It has sat thus
without a hoot or revolt for almost ever.
Will it wither away into feathers
in search of its lost goose,
or return to the wild
in search of the tree of its bark?
Will it grow into
a worthwhile metaphor of liberation
for the oppressed?
Or will it remain an unnamed wish—
unfulfilled, hurt, yet optimistic?
