April 6: Tasting memory

(today's prompt is to write a
food poem)

Nothing calls
nostalgia
like scent and taste:

sometimes, walking
down library shelves,
I catch a whiff of
perfume
and am transported
to the neck and arms
of somebody long
almost-forgotten.

Sometimes something
tastes of boiled-fried
potatoes, the kind
that will only ever
remind me of two
long months in
South Africa,
aching for home
while learning
the world for
the first time.

Cold beer will always taste of
leisurely evenings at home.
Wine, of coffee mugs and
college room lit gently warm.

Tasting
never seems to remind me
of the torture years of early
youth, when food was just
an ugly necessity.
Instead, I remember
when I learnt to love it:
a gangly teenager in
mother's arms, eating
yellow dal and aloo beans
out of her soft and lovely hands.

And sometimes, a wandering fragrance, even
unfamiliar beer, or cheap wine; remembering
fresh tomato mozzarella salad in warm shade,
blueberries in paper cups, cocktails brimming,
gelatos carved like gloriously petalled roses;

the stray memory of salivating
at something new, whilst
a river tidily thundered past,
or a sea sat lazily in the sand;
the gleaming sunloved cafes
of new cities that we, greedy,
memorized and tried to call
our own;

so much takes me back to
backpack and exhilaration;
a summer with the mother
a few lifetimes long.

April 5: Quiet Poems

I cannot seem
to write
quick poems
anymore:

there is tenderness
under my skin, and
words I have been
gathering, yes, but

it is harder to find abundance
and easy grace, joy is more
of a struggle than it ever was;

although somehow
it is more precious
for it. Bitingly so.

There are quiet poems
in how I grieve

quiet rhythms
to my words
and dreams -

how I watch them
burn
my cold-skinned
grandmother, how
everything changed
and how hard it is
to forget

how learning a new script
is exhilarating, and also
how it is breaking my heart

to be so close
and so far
(from
myself)

how everything makes
less sense, but seems
to be falling into place
anyway.

My stories
have become
more crisp

I can taste
autumn leaves
scattered like gems
on a forest floor.

I am more silent now,
but every time I worry
I have nothing to say

my body proves me wrong.

I languish in blank white
and rewrite words for days
until I rush onto paper
like a river, like dawn.
Here is a
quick
poem.
Here is
quiet.

April 4: He Who Talks of Borges

He was right --
it does get better

then
h a r d
again,

but hard
in a different way

with me grown better,
more aware

(I am finding new spaces
of peace in my body, some kind
of kindness and quiet grace that
I am discovering; I have learnt
to listen, I can hear my own silence

and my weeping without tears,
the stories my spine is writing,
the shuddering of my tired teeth,
and the weary words of my bones).

He was right --
when joy returns
after this long grieving,
this dull dispossession,
this journey of loss --
when joy returns
it does become
rich
like aged wine

; a texture that I
would never
have known.

I must just
keep my head
above water.
Must be kind
to myself
despite these
tired limbs.

His Kafka and Kundera
and practical-ways-to-face
this sadness the size of a sun
slip under my skin
when I am not
paying attention.

He thinks he
has committed
Borges' sin;
so have I.
We have not been
Happy. These shadows
follow us through time.

He thinks Borges
was born with some
primordial wonder.

So was he. And me,
I hope I can rewrite
this grieving, this
intellect that mouths
words while my heart
withers in its cage --
I hope I can find some
primordial, cardinal
wonder of my own.

I know now I will not
be able to keep it safe
within the confines
of words - but I hope
I can find it
again and
again,

hope I can live it
so fully
it never
leaves.

In a way.

April 3: On Reading Fiction

Going back to reading
feels like submerging myself in the sea
after years of a desert life.

Every sense is on edge;
I had forgotten
I could feel so much at once
from the narrow confines of my skin.

Here is where I find myself:
awake in somebody else's story.
The countries of my body
in a hundred places at once.
The scents of streets I cannot name.
The sounds of cities I have not seen.

Fiction is the kind of truth
or the kind of contradiction
you can feel in your flesh
instead of in your mind;
or in your mind instead of
in somebody else's words.
Fiction owns none of the
disharmonies of theory.

Here is where I find myself:
remembering a child who touched books
with the hands of a lover, kept words in a little mouth
like prayers, and held onto stories until they became
whispers, or dreams, or forgotten histories.

Here is where I find myself:
realizing that nothing really changes
even when nothing is the same.
Realizing my joy or my sorrow
or my skin stretched tight across
this cage of bleached bones
is not my own.
Only borrowed.

April 2: Faiz sahab

Faiz sahab,

How do I not grieve?

It was my intention to learn the secrets of your verses,

but I forgive you. I found only

darkness and a muddy sky. I forgive you.

The colour of your words is my inheritance.

This tongue is as sweet as it is strange to me.

However separated I might feel from the metaphors,

I feel as attached, united with, the tone of this language.

If Urdu is my beloved, it is also my rival.

I feel now a rift, a chasm with english too. 

Faiz sahab,

You are forgiven for it all.

Your poems perhaps found me the shore

of a new language in every vein of mine.

Found me a new face;

also made a stranger out of a neighbour, a shadow-sharer.

Faiz sahab,

my one hope is that this
may be a harmless miracle.

(Faiz sahab,

Gham kaise na karun?

Israr-e-ashar jaan ne ka tavqat tha

lekin maaf kiya. Mili sirf

tadiqi aur gida falak. Maaf kiya.

Aapke alfaazon ka ranjh meri virasat hai.

Zubaan jitni ajeeb hai, utni hi pyaari.

Muradi se jitna firaq hai, lahze se utna vasal.

Urdu mashuq hai toh raqib bhi.

Ab toh angrezi se bhi darar si lagti hai.

Faiz sahab,

aapko sab maaf kiya.

Aapki nazmon ne shayad har rag mai

nayi zubaan ka saahil dhoonda hai.

Naya chehra dhoonda hai.

Hamsaya ko paraya bhi banaya hai.

Faiz sahab,

aarzuu toh yahi hai
ki bezarar karamat ho.)

April 1: Moonstone

All day today
I have been blinking back tears.
Finally I stitched them all together
and hid them in the back of my throat.
I'd like to think of it as a precious gem
tucked away in this hollow - a moonstone
that burns when I swallow. A clouded,
burnished thing that glints blue in the light
of my voice. Something that could shatter:

into a rainfall of glass shards, a cloudburst of tears.
Something that could cut right through flesh and fear.

I'd like to think that the world is edged all in gold and gleaming gemstone
if only one looks in the right light/ I'd like to think of my insistent sorrow
as beautiful, something shining a hundred shades of blue under white light.

Cobalt:
the colour of the sky when I can't bear to be alive.
The simple absurdity of sorrow. How feeling
crashes through structures of language
and reason like a wild animal
through forest and field.

Teal:
the feeling of helplessness, and how it drips
down your spine and through your skin
like something dangerous.

Sapphire:
the sound of my grandmother's voice cracking.
The secrets she never unravelled. The way our house
still smells of grief. Her blooming pride, her easy
gratitude. Her toenails painted
like gemstones.

Indigo:
the deep purples of everything I have ever lost.
The weight of a long and happy life on my mind.
To have to tell my parents
I failed at joy.

Ultramarine:
how the ocean asks for more than its fair share
of light. Like me. How it glimmers unabashedly.
How it refuses to settle for anything less than a
miracle. How it loves the shore
in fragments; tides and waves.

Turquoise:
the stains of darkness
I never admitted I owned.



All this, and
Azure:
the insistence that life goes on, no matter what.
The hope that clings to my skirts and dusts my feet gold.
Azure: too many colours and conversations to condense.
The taste of blooming heartache that always becomes a shade
of sky. The memory of a blossoming in my grandmother's throat
that eventually turned solid and crystal, a moonstone
that she could never swallow. A tumour, insistent, and
a story that could only end one way. Like all of them.
Azure: the raw reality of death. How it means
everything; and nothing at all. How life is
the hardest thing in the world; and also
the easiest.

almost april

a note: it is almost april. the winters get harder to bear every year, i get sadder in my bones and heavier in my heart and find it harder to breathe. but it will pass. it is passing. it is already almost april. spring is blooming in front of my eyes, sunlight is filtering through clouds and leaves and mango blossoms. it has been a hard few months but i have been taking pictures and writing poetry to remind myself that in the right light, everything is burnished with gold. for too many days i have felt that i have lost all reason and meaning and giddy joy, all the metaphors have slipped through my hands like water, and the sky is a void through which i could fall forever. i am getting better. spring is breaking through. tomorrow i will try again. perhaps i will rise with a smile on my face, and remind myself of the miracle of my body and the miracle of the ground. perhaps i will even hear birdsong. it is almost april, and National Poetry Writing Month is starting. wish me luck!

Something important

It is strange to return, dripping
with my new life, carrying whole cities in
the small of my back and the hollows of my mouth.

Everything here is as it always was. Everything seems to be
at an edge, about to blossom or drown or catch afternoon flame.
Nothing is the same. Nothing remains. What was once whole
is now a skyful of cracks, an ocean of fissure, a house named grief.
Memory stalks through these rooms. The silence smells of peace
and unease. This house has seen so many bubbling childhoods
and now this house has known the desperate stench of death.
It is a particular kind of joy to be home. Everything here is still
as it always was. This house is a timeless childhood. A loss.

Mornings here smell of tea. Afternoons are gold.
Evenings melt into night like warm honey spreading on skin.
The horizon is always close. The neighborhood is far away.
This terrace is our watchtower, our garden of solitude,
these names mark our tongues with familiar scents.
I have unlearnt this home too long ago. I have left.
Too many roads are calling my name. These rooms
have known my griefs and my apathies, my secret vices.
There is too much here that will never belong to me.
There is too much here that will always be mine.

Everything seems to be at the edge of something important.
I leave this house with ease. I enter it with ease. Someday
something will happen. Something will move. This ocean
will shatter into a million pieces of glass, and I will lose
something important: my name in the tender morning sun
of this house. My feet in the dust of these floors. My eyes.

7:30 am chiaroscuro

keepsakes from this afternoon