THE TRUTH TELLS YOU NOTHING

A paler poison there could not be; if only

We could see the little grey left

In midsummer skies, they’d come back to us.

The children of the night. Traces scorned

Of a disappearing tongue, buried beneath

The cloying undergrowth; the leaves remain

Distilled in memory of a clan, of a clan that lived here

And was washed ashore when dead. If only

The colours were a soulless black, darkness silenced

Until broken; the lord of light astute

Brings me vain conviction, slivers slight as the moon withheld

Of hope. I will forgive them a thousand times over,

Sin erased from the whitest of folds.

Night’s children, rebirthed at dawn.

A DIVISION OF HEARTS

You speak of silences never sought

Except when uncertain; delicate pauses,

Mirror-mild, to say sorry. Sorry for what?

Being here tonight. For the Pakistani blood

That runs through my veins like a disease. It is a disease.

Your skin smells of tightened cords for sale

In heathen shops; you call it Lahore steam.

Memories drenched in the taste of salt paper and cloud

Unmoving, stock-still against a sky

Birthed only of winsome dreams. Of tell-tale beckonings

That bristle beneath the hiss of faceless fire.

I have seen it before, the revealing mark

Of a man who refuses to love what he loved as a child,

And yet does not forget. For such a man, after all,

My mother crossed the border, too.

TOUCH ME NOT

She could not love the man

Whose company she craved each night; the bed

Upon which they both lay, lovelorn the weightless dreams

Of her youth, faded but ne’er forgotten; it spoke

In whispers of a semblance sought between

The lips redder than a smoked cheroot

She’d once kissed; longed to kiss again,

And her husband’s, terraced across the violent contours

Of a grime-fed landscape. Her heart is yet asleep,

Lost yet in yearning for the sallow warmth denied

Unto herself; it is in love with love. A mirage

That would will mountains into the merest of men

And do nothing for a stricken child. She does not remember

His name, a fettered clasp of wing that could die

At once, her only window to a world

That feeds her charmless fancies; of a sea-door that ends

At the foot of his blood-burned corpse, eyes still

The colour of shadows, rain, and billowy houses in the dark.

Her husband lies alone in a bed

That was never his to claim.