Images

Summer trotted up the stairs, mid-afternoon
Smelling of patched memory
Weaving its way, precariously,
Out of distant, neatly cursive clouds
Spaced out like Dickinson's carefully meted verse
On the arched, gray-blue south-east.


The pale pink of a birthday bouquet
Crept out of alstroemerias
And drove off to the grocers
Looking to barter -
Uninvited affection, for a morsel of cheap hope.


The memory of a moonlit night
Stirred the gathering gloom
Glowing ghostly, like the struggling sun
Overtaken by thick, steel-gray, coastal city-fog.
Memory - spiked with citrus vodka, go-karts and disillusionment.


Truth made a reckless leap,
From glossed lips to a curly haired shoulder
And huddled, whimpering like a hurt puppy
In a corner of wood-brown, insecure, escapist eyes.
Dashed dreams were wiped on a napkin
discarded hopelessly, at the lunch table.


April 23rd & 24th, 2011.

If you come by...

by Rukhiya Faheem. (One of the greatest poems I've read)


My tongue has grown a rough red,
That color of prison walls-
It nibbles off punctured dreams
And burrows, leaving dust in my marrow.
I’ve grown fainter, but cozier,
For such lifelessness is rampant.

I’ve recalled too much, of us
In the span of a stolen bit of paper.
Carved several children
Out of a dense nebulous memory.

Contained all our decaying causes in a jar,
And let my cares rub over smooth stones
So, I could slip onto them this
Bitter taste of a prolonged promise.

If you come by, bring me, but one thing -
An innocent hollow night,
Which cannot be filled
To a full.

Madeeha

[A birthday gift by Rukhiya Faheem.]

I should wish to call you a fairy
If we both could dismiss the garish curves of her sorcery.

I delight in you, your colors
The stretch of your smile
The waves of your voice
That seem to breach, gently.
Undo and untie my webs, set me breathing
And then as you leave, you keep the doors ajar and approachable to bored spiders until I am calling from the stickiness.

You write and say words that fill me to my fingertips and then are kind to listen to the same from my mouth.
I wish to compare you to the morning flowers, to the depths of rivers, to the scarceness of peace, to bareness, to the overwhelming dramas on the skies herearound and to several everyday things.
I also wish to convey all this without actively conveying.
(Since we’ve haven’t met yet, you might not notice my shortcomings)

The Sun at dawn and dusk,
The white of the moon, and the early stars
The dull buzz of a bee
The red of strawberries
The not-poised-on-the-tip-of-my-tongue things
Are you, in different forms.

Like all our abrupt ends I’ll sign off from this dialogue with this-
What swirls in me and then rests pleasantly on my heart
Is love, I am certain
For myself and to what it could be (that is you.)

Spring by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Spring

TO what purpose, April, do you return again?

Beauty is not enough.

You can no longer quiet me with the redness

Of little leaves opening stickily.

I know what I know.

The sun is hot on my neck as I observe

The spikes of the crocus.

The smell of the earth is good.

It is apparent that there is no death.

But what does that signify?

Not only under ground are the brains of men

Eaten by maggots.

Life in itself

Is nothing,

An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.

It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,

April

Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

Edna St. Vincent Millay



http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap110401.html