Poetry: Nilofar Akhtar

Acquaintances

I have a few acquaintances who I see daily.

Counted on! circadian ones!

Crossing the street, standing in the grocery shop, peeping the corridor of classrooms.

I see them everywhere.

The round headed twinkle eyed youngish stroller

Silver haired, gracefully clad, fiftyish wife 

A teenager eager on fetching vegetables for mum, aunt, or stepmother.

Cycles, autoes, cars, friends, familiar faces, indifferent looks, all.

Acquaintances.

Will they remain so, forever?

Will they grow into friendships?

Deep, secure and warm like Ruth’s and Naomi’s.

Or will they fade away further into mere background existences

A speckle in the eye, a smoggy silhouette, an effervescent echo

They are fluid.

I’m fluid, too, in the back ground of their selfies.

In their observation,

Fluid and floating.

All relationships are!

You, me and her.

***

Nature Runs its Course

The golden sun sets on the obdurate rocks 

 The rocks know and wait for the sun to rise again.

They willfully wait and whine for the reunion

As they know the pliant pleasure yields to the adamant pain

(Of separation).

Behold the flamboyant Phoebe play Phyginda holding her lustrous lamp, 

Along with her, the effervescent clouds bid her stellar staff too, to play.  

The tiny goddess concerts through the night with them 

Do the starry mates falter ever to agree and obey?

Seasons also see that the course must be run.

The rhythm of nature mustn’t be broken.

Bloom, harvest, fall, frost and rain

Nature runs its course unfettered, free and open.

Man echoes all that is Nature

His follies reprimand the essence of existence

His virtue, Her chastity

And his act of service, Freedom and Deliverance.

***

An Epistle to Eternity

What shall be, when I 

Look at the sky falling 

And realize, there’s no one

But the ashes from the debris.

Debris of earthy brown and dusty heaven

The sad moon and the angry sun

And I see then,

A slab of stone.

My name peeping out

Some memories, a shroud

Nothingness. Sand and gravel

Mystery still-

An image etched out on parchment

There it is!

A love song

My epistle to eternity.

***

The Undead Receive Their Due

Here you are stuck again!

See, I told you.

It will be daunting 

And unrewarding.

But you insisted-

“There’s release that side

That we can’t abide.”

No death from hunger,

Or emptiness.

Brokenness either. 

You forgot brokenness bridges the gap

Between you and me.

Hunger makes us human.

Now,

The undead get their due

They return from the empty streets

The veins show some flow 

The heart beats again

Redemption calls out 

For one chance,

The final exigency

I shout, “Go on, there’s the final chance!”

Though, I understand

 It’s hard to be human again.

***

Bio: Professor Nilofar Akhtar has been serving higher education Department, Uttarakhand since 2005. However, she began her career in the year 2001 as a guest faculty. She has been supervising research to half a dozen research scholars, and three doctorates have been awarded under her so far. She has been teaching Pre PhD course work, postgraduate and undergraduate classes for more than 20 years. Alongside her work in the department and mentoring students from there, she has also designed syllabus for various competition agencies of the state. she has conducted an international conference, a seminar, a theatre workshop and several invited talks and has been invited as a resource person at international conferences at Dubai, Bali, Kathmandu and Vietnam. She has worked on the Comparative Study of the theme of Marital Relationship in the Novels of Anita Desai and Shashi Deshpande for her doctoral thesis. Her research areas include Romanticism, Modernism, Literary theory and Criticism, Gender studies and Post-colonial studies. She has published research papers, articles and book chapters in various journals and books of national and international repute. Her two edited books on Gender Roles and Green Concepts and Environmental Sustainability were published establish her as an avid environmental feminist.

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Setu, December 2025