Five Poems
Safar
For my beloved,
A. You get me through,
B. to get me through.
A. Sahib; A Companion.
B. Safar; A Journey.
There are certain places I can’t sleep,
rooms I can’t enter, corridors I don’t walk.
Even if the building
was demolished and rebuilt
the longitude and latitude of memory
knows the gateways to a new burn,
in the same old place.
Precision is a method. I know
exactly where the light struck in
a room before it burned down. I keep
two words on my tongue:
A. Sahib; A Companion.
B. Safar; A Journey.
A. You got me through,
B. to get me through.
Abduls Voice
Abdul’s voice recites:
Sacrifice and love, these are armless hugs/ you ought to praise your color of skin like molton brown rock/ the rusting light in the smoking fog / those little rabbits with white tails scurrying away too fast/ the bee sting in the bottom of your boot/ on the bone of your foot/ the cactus hair (nature’s knife) prickling a new pain/ the moons blue halo bleeding over the mountains / returning, returning, returning/ a glow-
This is how I was reborn to remember
”here I am”
with all the heart in my story / all the story in my heart
Time is for returning;
to the first dream/ I ever saw/ as a child, where the black crow was not a bad omen/
just another bird/ you might throw bread/
here we return/ to the logic of love/ all of it’s resolve/
Abdul taught me first-
about the tenderness of living/ how to scribble on a rock/ so that I might rest in peace
/so that I might write a poem/ so that I might throw a crow/ a crumb
A Funeral At The Mosque
I went to a funeral at the mosque,
where shame draped
the family in white linen.
Pigeons picked on crumbs and
white lies about
the method of death, ‘it was
a car - no it was in a car’,
and my heart decided, the way
in which one dies is irrelevant
/if one is dead.
Still, I fall on both knees some nights -
submitting to
limpness. Sucking
on ice that cuts my throat, slides
down to rest in the stomach; sending
up the shivers of winter
/every June.
Moth Chewing Cloth
Flowers exhale a lullaby-
“One morning in September
a rumble came, when I didn’t know-
the life in me,
that could quietly grow.
Unknown like a moth huddled between cloth,
that charcoal winter wool;
chewing through the weave...
to leave a mark-
to leave a mark-
to be a moth,
to be a moth-
To be a Mother;
To be a Mother...
My tongue leaned on my throat,
saliva smothered the gate. Water
took up most of my body,
and then the heart-
And then the part of the heart-
that learns laughter before
language,
a child.
You weren’t even you,
you is a word I carried
You, who might have learned laughter before language
holding me, growing me
I read somewhere,
“Flowers are how plants laugh”,
But I hadn’t known a seed had sprout-
I waited sick and your petals grew,
You never learned me,
But I learned you.
Unskinned,
Have you ever itched
a scratch so hard, the cap
of your knee began to bleed?
Have you ever needed to see blood,
to recognize - it’s still there?
It’s still there.
I’m still here.
The skin is the only organ,
holding us in- always ready
to erupt;
Sometimes after a cut,
my heart falls out easy like a penny-
the world enclosing it,
becomes so uncontrollably Red.
Redness leaking to be looted,
easy like a penny,
so easy like a penny
Meetra Javed is a Pakistani-American writer and producer based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been featured in World Literature Today, Azeema Magazine, Silverneedle Press, Barzakh (University of Albany NY State Writers Council). She is currently working on her first full length poetry book, Standard Deviation.
