I was a heavy sigh,
A comma between an inundated silence & the weeping feet;
I tried to warn the silk shadows of patience into a lie
But mellow sunshines rise to derail my poems.
Judgement Day is walking,
With a head in a creeper, out-growing the dogs barking in my head (or outside the window?)
I am a word I cannot praise hard enough,
My parents talk about the dreamy afterlife:
I’m burning holes at everything I stare –
the black paper, the walls & the sofa.
I was a dark cloud,
Consumed by my opaque palms
I deviate into a realm that throbs against my chest,
you & a hair falling into strands of malnourishment;
you & a part of me –
a sigh relived.
‘Tis the span of an afterlife,
the tomorrow whose revelations won’t settle until midnight.
Here is a sight that would not lose you amidst a crowded loneliness
Because it sees you, beyond the clouds covering your haunted visage
It’s the beating of a heart going berserk
Each minute is a dreadful wailing of an infant dragging its frail body as fast as it can
Each second is a woman screaming at her face in the mirror, she doesn’t recognise the other one – why is she disappearing?
I want to see, I thought I did but it was only wishful thinking
I only sought your pain to dab my ink in something different, thinking that it would help me make a difference –
And now my pages have become tales of darkness that had nothing to do with me
My vision has become the periphery to a loneliness I thought I could erase,
Because pain comes with a filthy shell that only morphs into an addiction upon peeling through the layers;
Thus, I erase my words to make space for your yours – I ignite my dark nights to revel in yours.
Pain makes for the most beautiful conversations, and even more meaningful connections – like a poem that writes itself without even needing your consent, your voice or your ink. It simply breathes in its way, in its own space.
I am a flower pot
Tumbling down the table,
I still shatter in your palms
As you try to catch me;
Now we’re both bleeding world’s sucking our tongues while the galaxies around us burst open into nothingness
My mouth is a sex fluttering like the butterfly in your belly
It crawls down your abdomen and leaves a word on your thigh
You discover it once the moon dies away
As the sun ties a knot with Alzheimer’s
There is no light to burn the tips of our desires
But did I ever tell you of the flames hidden in my heart, tucked away in between the day and night?
You come closer
I am the flower out-growing the pot,
I am the pot filling the flower – the singing that eats the lyrics and churns on dead instruments
You come closer
And I’m the shattering and a bloodshed
I’m the demise, in tangent sighs and maroon walls.
We share the sins that bind us. The tip of my tongue is the sun melting in your eyes. You see it clearly, you let it burn your throat while coughing lava on the plain white walls.
The water flows upward, the rains have been blossoming in the Heavens this season. My hands remember your touch, my ink retraces your sighs. Each letter encompasses the soul of your essence.
My tears recite your name. Over and over again, it’s like a rhythm that sounds anew each time it licks my ears. I want this song to remember us, to remember the way these sins bind us.
The way lover’s love, and never stop. I want my existence to reverberate yours, I want my heart to kiss your palms – and stay within, enclosed in the flesh that beats like home.
We share the sins that bind us, only to taste the glory of vulnerability, truth and discomfort – only to love a little longer than forever, a little faster than time.
Only to love a little larger than the space; only to love like a Prayer made in piety – to love like a poem that lives in our eyes, lips and hands.
It lives in the letters of our bodies, it grows in the shadow of our heat.
It’s insanity – to be so full of life/ blueberry sighs/ burning glass frames/ my image is complete/ your lullaby in my lap/ our home – a breathing cloud of ashes that outshine rainbows, a giggle of an orange peel/ bittersweet pages/ all written in consonance with hope/ heaven/ relief.
He sows, He reaps – He brushes past the instances of rolling buds and autumn heaps.
The misaligned creepers are set in line with the constellations and somehow, the ephemeral space makes it hard for them to breathe.
The Judgement day arrives in a pocketful of systematic hate until the garden becomes a miserable palace of weed.
He still sows – but there is no one to reap.
There are poets, here and there but He has built a wall of thorns that renders the seekers blind. Once their eyes start to bleed, the taste of their blood halts their spirit – it engulfs the hope of reaping the garden of faith.
I’ve been standing on the edge of this palace, they say yellow makes them happy but this palace of weed suffocates me – it also clings to my lungs, and calls itself my ‘Home’.
I lunge forward to blind myself, I really do but every single time I miss by a fraction of a sentence, a yawning poem stretching between my toes.
He sows – that awakened poem, that distracting sentence, that hopeful lunge / The Gardner has a season for every name, I wonder what mine is.
Rains/ a blackened sigh/ the ephemeral space/ the broken stars/ the melting clouds/ a stutter between the sunrise and the sunset – I’m an anomaly without a name.
I see, the uprooted garden and the enormous space. I breathe for the first time because I believe what I see. I believe what I seek.
The Gardner – that made me, you and the bellowing universe amidst a poetry of Creation, a scream of magnificence.
-Nameera Anjum Khan.
This poem takes inspiration from religion, particularly the depiction of God in the movie ‘The Shack’ which provides a brilliant and an optimistic insight into what kind of entity God really is. It also sheds light on how humans sometimes become the judge of events that they truly don’t understand. We become hopeless at the immediate sight of a bad circumstance, never once trying to grasp the meaning of divinity behind things.
I want to be an openness bending at the tip of the sunlight falling on my back. But I’m also afraid of burning in my own fire.
I carry my hostilities like a poet who adores perspiring on a hot sunny afternoon in the arms of an old monument that houses some grand secrets only he can see – and I can’t unsee. I’ve been his muse and his monument – sometimes a pillar draped in silk.
I yearn to be a vastness, much wilder than the blue skies. Someone once told me that I was silly to think of blue skies as wild, and I only laughed. How can you not see the calm that has rained, birthed storms and swallowed deaths? I realise that it’s indeed silly of me to think that people would see how I manage to carry this calm.
I don’t burn in my own fire. I invite other’s to ignite my flame so that I can master my art of living for others – because what is a woman without a role?
Simply a human? No, that is deeply silly of me, indeed.
-Nameera Anjum Khan.
So yes, day 9 is over, where I live and I really did not want to break my flow. Hence, I quickly looked up this enthralling work of art to inspire me today!
This one is a take on gender roles – particularly the one’s attached to a woman. It takes inferences from the Indian culture as well and the thinking of a family/culture-oriented woman who is made to feel suppressed because of her desires for freedom.
Sometimes, things that reflect a particular emotion aren’t exactly what they’re composed of, the blue skies for example that are not always blue or calm, for that matter.
I always feel that seasons and nature is a very great way to deeply understand human emotions in a poetic light. Hence my obsession with them is pretty evident in this piece too!
I have a feeling that my eyes are too many faces looking down at the dusty pavement. But the skies were never made out of ribs, the seas never mastered the tides of my blood and the moon could never command the gravity of my heart.
This may look like a weak surrender upon a deaf glance but look again. It’s a wonder, not of virginity re-shaping itself or the veil of pregnancy blooming through nine seasons.
It is nine births, and more – all emerging from the point of no return. My head is all the colours of your rainbow touch. My skin is all the senses of your secret desire. My existence is all the questions you’re too afraid ask, let alone answer.
Sex. A fluttering of –
Nothing.
Sometimes, I see myself as the God. Sometimes, I see myself as the Creation. In both versions, I remain a sinner seeking heaven – an irony dodging misery only to write poems on it.
How do you see me?
Why do you see me?
You say that the sun is out tonight, I never knew untimely mornings, not face-to-face at least. I had heard of a happening that corrupts itself overtime. A sickness that spreads like creepers, everywhere. A tangible dignity swinging from the chandelier.
A woman and her birth – the untimely sunrise and the timely corruption.
Everything. Inebriated buds of truth. Nothing you’ve read before and everything you’ve read before; you die everyday just to see. How? Why?
Answers. Questions.
Birth – the memory burns. When will it rain?
-Nameera Anjum Khan.
Who is a woman? What is your understanding of a woman? Womanhood is one of my absolute favourite topics to write about and when I stumbled upon this work of art, it invoked so many things inside of me. My mind and my heart was filled with all sorts of questions and answers. I hope you enjoy persuing this reflective piece, thanks for reading!
P.S
Kudos to the artist for this wondrous artwork that can captivate anyone’s attention effortlessly and not just that, but it seems to knock upon your conscience in multiple ways. Click on the caption underneath the painting to visit an enthralling gallery!
Expression of eyes (Hitomi) by Kiyoshi, Kobayakawa
Nesting in the sighs of a summer dream, is an autumn wish dying in its reflection. She trembles like a dead leaf under your embrace, as you tighten your love that comes in only one colour – that of taking and taking until ‘Giving’ is but a whitewashed truth.
In her eyes, it’s not the moon that shines or the stars you promised her. It’s a dying volcano uprooting its veins until her lips form a smile. You looked like you understood, you did – but only the smile. You could never contain grief so you bore pretense in its stead.
Her mouth is a language you know all too well, but beneath it is a forest that gardens its own warmth, a hope that eats itself because it has never been fed. Every soft caress is a tale that burdens her.
Soon the summer will be a realization and in it, a dream that erupts for a long, long time will take shape. Until the dead leaves are cursed again by impatient wanderers and she’s not the silk maiden anymore.
She’s but a stale page – yellowed at the tips and still gnawing at the leftovers of a letter that was never sealed and sent. It contains her heart – a corrupted muse, and it won’t be long till the body commits suicide in the lap of a nameless suffering – the kind you carry to your grave, and further.
There are tides in my tongue that erase your name every time I trace it on the corners of my mouth
I create a vigour in my ribs that swirls in the tangerine buds of the laughing skies
My paper feet are cut in places that can never learn to sleep,
I eat this canvas until I’m the piece of art
But I’m deranged in places that don’t exist loud enough
I de-layer,
Bit by bit
Until the flesh is a bare secret-
It’s your story but you keep peeling it away,
Look at you now – a subsumed flame in a nest of rage, a holy prayer covered in filth and harbouring a look that says more than actions do;
You’re a ship in the sky, sailing away the gravity in hopes of falling on the ground.
You never do.
-Nameera Anjum Khan
Before this day ends, I decided to pen down a muse which was quite spontaneous, which speaks for itself I suppose :3
There was a potpourri of thoughts behind this one but the most particular one was – the description of a toxic relationship and the fear of conformity to truth. Sometimes, people lock themselves up in a cage because they fear getting hurt and in the process, they end up hurting others. It’s an interesting paradox to reflect upon but going through it is an entirely different phase.
Conclusively, I’d like to add that vulnerability is a very precious thing and if someone decides to take off their mask in front of you, you’re not under an obligation to reciprocate the same. You must take your time but through means that don’t end up hurting others.
