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. Her poetry has been translated into Spanish, Greek, Arabic, Polish, Italian, Albanian and Persian. More about her can be found at sheikha82.wordpress.com
Carboniferous
It has become important to
speak in metaphors.
Grim nights vacant of logic
rip through
red cloths of complacency.
Whether
your slightly disoriented
eyes are the colour
of compressed feuds, or the
deep rich
creamy brown that dresses your
flesh,
whatever the purpose of
existence remains,
it is in burying –
tirelessly, with every molecule
of urgency that retains a
moment from
becoming too real; burying
the voids
in endlessness of deserts;
burying confessions
in combinations of words.
You tell me
it is hard for you to speak
the one language
common between us. So, I
dig desperately.
I tell you stories of
capture and rescue,
hoping you'd be oblivious
to how stolen
the themes are. These
shards of soot
I bite into wisp and clog
my teeth. Old women
from their resting graves
have begun
visiting my dreams, dressed
in jewels
the colour of thick scents
in black haze.
I wonder how possible it is
to hex a name
and you gaze at me with
both concern
and fear. But, I keep
pushing my language
as you watch blackbirds
starting to flock
at the window of your
intact sanity. Bury
in manageable sacksful
burning contrails
of your past, and make sure
they are all
not in the same place, so
when corvids
arrive to claim the loot,
you'll know what
was snatched up instantly.
This will
help you, I say, as your
eyes watch the smoke
gather at my back, rising
up like a man
on stilts. We'll be like
lovers in a book;
you know the smell of coal
as I know
the depths of soil. Nothing
between us
will not be survived.
***
Pulchritudinous
after Zuleika: An Oriental
Song by Clark Ashton Smith
Once on a ledge extending
like a substitute
balcony, a sparrow lost its
flight to the whip
of an eagle's dodged grasp.
It fell like cotton
on concrete, melodic chirp converting
to soundless gape. I
watched the eagle
clap against the breeze's
natural route
pushing the air to cut a
way for its mighty
wings, my eyes never
leaving its penetrating
glare on the round warmth
unmoving
save for its craning beak
to which I placed
a cup of water, surmising
sufficiency
in leaving it to fend for
itself, that it would
know to lift its brokenness
over the lip
and offer me its
last-breath blessing for
tending. How its
life-draining eyes looked
towards my ignorance, so
large beneath
their tiny lids. How my
eyes watched
its motionless struggle, so
hollow in
their ascetic heed. My face
comes from
the parlours of a thousand
nights bathed
in silky moon-waters:
flawless, untempered
mark of beauty. How your
eyes bloom
like honey-centred cloves,
so devout
on cliffs of wild-flowers.
Every night is
a bird in a manger:
rapine-nester. I have
built many nests from last
rays of the sun,
tender and eager throngs.
***
Zojaj (v)
We keep the lights off for
moths
that throng at the beckon
of twilight –
at incidence of holiness –
the masjids
are locked. Down where
muezzins kneel
prayer mats gleam the
imprints of feet;
in another calm the qibla
is a black stone
under omniscience – nothing
is temporary,
everything is permanent –
in another world.
We draw a halqa
around our feet, call it
hisaar – protective
barrier – the obstruct
of construct – and we
anoint it light
in another manifestation.
The safeenah
is clear in sight with
garlands of rayhanas
and the hand that places a
piece of misri
in our mouths points us in
the direction
we were always meant to be
before
now – before falling – our
wings vibrant
under wide canopies of
bejewelled trees.
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