
Two Poems
Look at the Moon
“Look at the moon and tell me what you see:
Is the moon half-empty or half-full?”
I do not want to sound crazy.
So I tip-toe around the cold metal of the question;
I make aerial rounds of the abyss
The pilot who knows her plane is about to crash
Fireflies and maggots rush madly in
and out of the blacks
and the whites
The story is stalled, a study in suspended anxiety:
It's full. The moon
is completely full, you dolt.
What kind of clichéd trick question is this?
Don't you see how full it always is?
But if the sky is an abyss
and we're hurtling into it
at the speed of darkness,
The moon is a genuine question
The moon is a beckoning sense of loss
A presence that stands in for every absence
A line of verse from a lifetime ago
(Suraiya Shafaq, circa 1999)
sprawls like a desert in the night sky
(The poetess
would have thought them stars;
But the moon was a bare thread
when she died.)
“Interesting,” he remarks
he proceeds to un-empty
my half-full glass once more
“You know, I have heard
some women's moods swing
with the moon’s phases;
Are you one of them?”
There is no tiptoeing past lunacy, though.
And my time is running out
Before the bell-jar half-fills itself with stars,
At the stroke of midlife
Before the fireflies are switched off,
And my phone battery dies on me
I must categorically enter the Black
And leave the White
So here I am, mid-sentence,
emptying a full glass of red wine
Over his head.
Behind me, the crescent
emerges, revolver still held to my head,
saying, “Good answer.”
Ghazal
Tonight the cypress has a prisoner, caught like a bird in words
Erring on the side of wilderness, nestled unstirred in words
First comes love, then nausea, two-thirds
of a season of belonging, numb-ered in words
On the margin of error, scrawled in twigs
A bonfire of errors, overheard in words
Then comes divorce, a harvest of grief
Womanhood is reaped outward, inwards
His disclaimer that love cannot be undone
Unraveling the history of desire, misheard in words
Nostalgia comes next: in re-membered
remnants of letters, love’s absurd in words
Eclipsed by solitude, carrying to term
A stillborn violence muttered in words
A whisper soaring on wings of ash
Quickened as rumour, Freedom’s Twittered in words