New | Poetry | Saadia Peerzada

Photo by Arshi Zama

Resting Place

You 

are missing from the moments that have your name written all over them

absence is a muscle, it has its own memory

my language is stuck in my throat,

and a foreign one thickens in my mouth.

So the incommunicable stays, 

my sentences stay suspended,

you retract your gaze.

Our hearts are graveyards to people who still live

their spring is our immutable winter,

so we mould ourselves into memory, 

memory: a resting place, rewritten history,

always tainted and hence beautiful,

a living thing, it cheats our way out of loss,

a heart still beats in place of a dying echo,

we rewrite the echo, backwards.

Before you were the Witness

You are vivid in these songs of separation

even when the space between us

is fossilised by too many years,

by the distance between who you were

and all you’ll become;

all the things I’ll never get to see.

You need another to tolerate yourself

I’m not even sure if I exist

without seeing myself in someone’s eyes 

all know of myself is a reflection, a distortion

subject to everyone but me,

who was I in your leaving

what part of me did your absence tuck away

who was I before I made you a mirror?

prove to me that i existed*

*line inspired by the verse "If you leave who will prove that my cry existed?/ Tell me what was I like before I existed" from Call me Ishmael Tonight by Agha Shahid Ali

Running in Circles All Summer

Summer pains us in new ways each time,

last year we drove around Eidgah,

and talked about the discomfort 

of occasionally being distanced from ourselves,

dissociation, a survival strategy, 

call it auto-pilot and it’ll help us feel in control

These days we are baptised in it,

our bodies blurred at the edges, 

eyes seeing a lot, retaining a lot less,

they roll back to 2014, the year of dystopian fiction,

at least then, it was just entertainment,

not fate strung through a greater unknown.

We ask for sleep to feel restful

not like the wait 

for our consciousness to catch a break,

call it “death with benefits” and laugh it off,

comedy levelling tragedy, 

catharsis ironic like life, like living.

I want us to stop running in circles, asking

wani kya chu karun,*

for words to be more

than just epithets to dread.

The untranslatable never makes it to papers anyway,

God, ease us from the grief that’s inextricably ours, 

ease us from our own selves. 

*Kashmiri: what do we do now?

Grief/Fear

You told me fear held you white knuckled,

that bile bubbled and receded at the back of your throat,

a human pendulum.

My sadness never ends 

and I don’t remember where it began

just that it never left, even in joy, 

that I marked the passage over and over

where Khalil said 'your joy is your sorrow unmasked,'

that I didn’t mind as long as I had you

even in absolute dread.

“We are becoming two very sad people.”

I wrote the word till it lost meaning

s a d

SAD,

snow and darkness and associated symptoms.

words regain meaning in your eyes

the pendulum swings.

A cage wide enough to breathe in 

 

We can’t take the echo of the silence anymore, we drive

failed attempts at la vie en rose,

our vision compromised.

 

Fred Astaire plays, the tips of your hair are golden, fleetingly,

like all freedom,

the blind leading the blind.

 

Today lets us carry the bitterness of twenty,

tuck loneliness into our back pockets,

tarnished glasses dull the edges of a sick world,

the cage widens,

even if it is for a little while.