Sheikha A. (Western Voices 2022)

 Bio: Sheikha A. is from Pakistan and United Arab Emirates. Her works appear in a variety of literary venues, both print and online, including several anthologies by different presses. Recent publications have been Strange Horizons, Pedestal Magazine, The Ekphrastic Review, Silver Birch Press, Abyss and Apex, and elsewhere. Her poetry has been translated into Spanish, Greek, Albanian, Italian, Arabic, Polish and Persian. She is the co-author of a digital poetry chapbook entitled Nyctophiliac Confessions available through Praxis Magazine. More about her published works can be found at sheikha82.wordpress.com 

 

Misty

The night between the pines is imaginary 

like the name of the moon I haven’t yet 

seen from between the cloudy muck

of foibles the shadows have been feeding

me so far; I may have seen two in each night 

that followed, but my eyes have grown skin

over its irises – brown cataracts of fatigue

that watch the moon multiplying creating 

a ring of white stones on black parchment

with doused embers of burning stars piled

in the centre; it could be a memory

pulled out and hung on the loose nail

of the nine years I’ve spent in nebulous

transparency; the year that had just begun:

the origin of two thousand six – my present

hangs like an appendage of yesterday.

*** 

Aristocracy

Several moons have hatched out of their shells

and hang like a string of pearls around the sky’s

svelte shoulders. The night has been leaning on,

breathing out its cold, apathetic heart into rings

of blue smoke that have been crowning trees 

tall enough for a coronation whilst the little

hobbit sized fertility stays close to ground;

the food is rich beneath the soil where the air is

less elevated allowing breathing to remain easy

and less laboured. Gravity is for moons that can

birth in traceable progenies bellowing its light

with undemocratic predilection. The art of flying

above clouds depends first on how well one sees

the clouds. The wingless are born with skins

between toes meant for flapping waters

and eyes large to fill their vision with dreams

the size of the moon seen from a distance. 

*** 

Like grand menial things

melancholy has imprinted its soul on mine,

the moon has impaled its light of death-kissed

colours on a moulting winter that has the path

I walk arrogated with snow, where every piece

of you I own lays scattered across an apathetic,

lonesome tar under a cold, frigid night conjunct  

with a wail-rampant sky, the whale of its echoes

which still live inside my bones held together 

by loose molecules of an adhesive called tears;

the salt has dried over my face like massacred

words that have bled off language to its belittled

form – litter to an otherwise dignified silence – 

poetry.  

***

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Setu, April 2022