I have been trying really hard to write, but have been able to think only in images. Here are two poems I have written recently. The title of the second poem may be why I have been unable to compose an intelligent post.
Today, I am thinking of this lone bird flying over Old Lahore. And also thinking of the sky in the same neighborhood on basant day, littered with kites in every color, and of the happy children who flew them. I was one of those children once, too, watching others flying kites, people who loved me, whom I loved. No matter how many miles there are between them and me, the loss of one of them is still heart-breaking, maddening. And that's all I will say about that.
-Weatherman-
"And which way does the wind blow,"
I ask him.
He carefully tears a sheet from his book,
and blows it away in pieces -
one end of the page in his mouth,
his fingers changing its landscape,
his breath giving it wings.
Words, like tiny insects,
slanting and beetle-black,
dance in the air,
kiss the swaying grass,
descend into the valley.
They don't even make a sound.
He plucks a verse
from my hair.
An incoherent line
ripples on it
like a dismembered ant.
"Downward, it seems," he lets go.
It flies behind its comrades
as if to prove a point.
-In Mourning-
I swirled you into a potful of milk
maybe you got lost in the cupful that boiled over the edge
I turned away for a moment,
or for years,
and when I looked back,
some of the milk was racing down the rim
in frothy bubbles
maybe
you were scorched then
from the inside out,
you sizzled on the stove-top,
turned tree-sap brown in some places, wax-like
and honey-comb golden in others, toffee-like,
smelled sickly-sweet, metallic
like dark brown sugar burning in butter,
like freshly spilled blood at the feet of a corpse
Today, I am thinking of this lone bird flying over Old Lahore. And also thinking of the sky in the same neighborhood on basant day, littered with kites in every color, and of the happy children who flew them. I was one of those children once, too, watching others flying kites, people who loved me, whom I loved. No matter how many miles there are between them and me, the loss of one of them is still heart-breaking, maddening. And that's all I will say about that. -Weatherman-
"And which way does the wind blow,"
I ask him.
He carefully tears a sheet from his book,
and blows it away in pieces -
one end of the page in his mouth,
his fingers changing its landscape,
his breath giving it wings.
Words, like tiny insects,
slanting and beetle-black,
dance in the air,
kiss the swaying grass,
descend into the valley.
They don't even make a sound.
He plucks a verse
from my hair.
An incoherent line
ripples on it
like a dismembered ant.
"Downward, it seems," he lets go.
It flies behind its comrades
as if to prove a point.
-In Mourning-
I swirled you into a potful of milk
maybe you got lost in the cupful that boiled over the edge
I turned away for a moment,
or for years,
and when I looked back,
some of the milk was racing down the rim
in frothy bubbles
maybe
you were scorched then
from the inside out,
you sizzled on the stove-top,
turned tree-sap brown in some places, wax-like
and honey-comb golden in others, toffee-like,
smelled sickly-sweet, metallic
like dark brown sugar burning in butter,
like freshly spilled blood at the feet of a corpse