What Does It Mean to Be a Muslim Writer?: What Does It Mean to Be a Muslim Writer?

Two Poems

Look at the moon and tell me what you see

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

 

About the author

Sumayya Syed is a graduate student of Sociology and lives in Kashmir. Her poems have appeared in KashmirLit and The Shoreline Review. She writes at the intersection of home, loss, and womanhood.