Sophia Naz (Climate Change, Eco-activism, Whisperings of Social Justice)

Sophia Naz is a bilingual poet, author, editor and translator and artist. She has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize; in 2016 for creative nonfiction and in 2018 for poetry and her work has featured in numerous literary journals and anthologies over the last two decades. She has authored the poetry collections; Peripheries , Pointillism Date Palms Open Zero , and Shehnaz, a biography (Penguin Random House 2019). Bark Archipelago, her fifth poetry collection published in March 2023.

 

Unstoppered

 

In late December

rain became a jilted lover

her heart poured out - a deluge of letters

seed syllables hit the ground running

jumping in the mouths of frogs

Even the gutters began to sound

like the “click” songs of Miriam Makeba.

 

By January, no metaphor

can encompass our misery

Wetter and wetter this weather

Unstoppered, her tears - now ours

 

 

 

Ash Land

 

Ash floats on the sky, a scattered paper

blotting out news of the sun.

 

Ash falls to the ground, forecasts

ill stars all around.

 

After apocalyptic orange-red

ash alights, tiny, white

 

 butterflies as far as eyes can see

snow of ash, seeping in bones.

 

Winter in autumn

Earth before death.

 

 

Sea Change

 

I am the murdered granddaughter of Tethys

the lost kiss, of marine phosphorescence

a ghost swarm of eels swaying on abyssal seamounts

Baleen of gray whales whose prayers were teeth

 of endless rosaries whispering “tamtu tamtu”

into the deep indigo

that neither day nor night could catch

 

I am the murdered granddaughter of Tethys

My limbs of every hue of blue turned

bitter milk, peppered black

Pandora’s nipple oozing sewage,

 

I am the murdered granddaughter of Tethys

Look upon me, encased in a glass cage

See in my sea

page after page

your future obituary

 

 

 

Bird of Memory

 

Here was feather,

truth against which,

a heart was weighed

and found wanting.

 

As earth is

anagram of heart,

and rose of eros, you

arose - it was morning

 

Each evening you

stitched up the wounds of sky

that thread, hypnotic

 

invisible string on which

your vanished songs

play, on mind-vinyl

fade to black.

---

Setu, July 2023 :: Climate Change, Eco-activism, Whisperings of Social Justice