The passing of the new Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Register of Citizens in December 2019 drew immense protest across India that sought to defend constitutional rights and the secular fabric of the country. Popular and scholarly attention has been widely given to the civil, artistic, and journalistic commentary that flourished during that period of protest between December 2019 and March 2020: discursive analyses about freedom of expression, Muslim precarity, Indian secularism, and democracy. This essay turns specifically within that period, instead, to explore the affective dimensions of the Urdu protest poetry circulating in North India. Attention to affect and circulation highlights not only what poems say, but how they feel as they move, revealing ways in which the poetic expressions of solidarity, rejections of reductive codifications of Indian-ness, and articulations of “we,” actually come to be embodied, producing the pluralistic, diverse public being hailed, here developed as a “poetic public.” The widespread animations of such poems like Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s “Ham Dekhenge” open a channel to consider how Urdu poetic publics dissolve barriers of time, space, and other social barriers to cultivate potential collectivities formed through shared senses of belonging, hope, and a particular socio-political awareness.