Poems forever
Words forever
“Dance, when you’re broken open. Dance, if you’ve torn the bandage off. Dance in the middle of the fighting. Dance in your blood. Dance when you’re perfectly free.”
“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”
“The minute I heard my first love story,
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.
Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere.
They’re in each other all along.”
“When I am with you, we stay up all night.
When you’re not here, I can’t go to sleep.
Praise God for those two insomnias!
And the difference between them.”
Rumi’s quotations - excerpts from the translation of Coleman Barks
Faces
By Zahra Akbar
Layers and some veils,
I have many faces and,
None of them untrue.
Fire
By Rida Sarwar
I trip over my own steps
My own thorns instead of protecting me prick my hands
Its hard to stand straight
When you know you just want to crumble down to the ground...
You lie down on the ice cold ground
The fine crystals start falling from the sky
They fall with such grace, it’s a shame to watch them
Just fall to the ground and disappear into the mist
The facade you put up in front of the world
How long do you think you can survive like this?
As long as the fire in my heart burns with passion
Like the waves that tirelessly hit that stone
I’ll stand like a wall , I’ll rise like a skyscraper
I won’t let this storm blow me like a house of cards
I will build a castle, out of all the stones they throw at me
This fire they can’t extinguish it this time
I will fight, rise, fly higher
I will let my wings tear apart this sky .
A puzzling grey
By Rutaba Tanvir
With charcoal pencils she coloured her canvas
Of roses and thorns
What a pity that she never realized
It were the roses that
Pricked her the most
It remains a lucid mystery till date
This tale of confusion
Neither of them could ever find out
Who it was that was the lover
And who the beloved?
Missing
By Aiman Ibrar
Have you seen her?
That girl:
With her tangled black locks and dark, dark eyes?
Lost her somewhere - don’t know where to look.
‘Searched behind those towering books and racks,
Loved to read - She told me that.
Nothing to be found.
Peeked into all the corners down
Those mysterious alleys,
Everything seemed to relate to her,
Yet no sign.
I hunted her, between friends and foes
And worldly woes - though she never belonged there-
Not a word.
Now as I sit back and think
I’ve nowhere else to look.
For her.
Didn’t know her that well,
I realize now,
Never let on much; that one.
Shook me in and out, she did
The last time I met her,
With her tangled hair wild, wide eyes bulging out
I lost my muse, she said,
I don’t know where to start.
Words won’t come to me she said,
My world’s falling apart.
Turned my back on the mirror,
Crazy much? I mocked
I looked back and she was gone,
Haven’t seen her since and my mind
Is kind of fogged.
I miss that twinkle, that wild joy;
I miss me.
And I have nowhere else to look.
Compiled by SK
