Poetry at Sangam

SangamHouse

 










Song in a Blind Country

There’s not a drop of rain
For the light to crack in the gardens
For continents to stick to each other
For a ghazal to open its eye
 
In ice deserts
In Damascus
Where Zainab’s wail is still
Searching for lacy eyelashes
Of an infant’s face turned-into-salt
A drop is hung on the boundary
Of the cold baby’s eyes.
 
Pluck it; it’s the hanged Moon,
Not a drop of rain.
 
Put it in the pit
Dug
for clouds, dawn, and dew;
 
I will throw a periwinkle poem, my brother’s dead-blue iris, sea gods, indigo
crops, Faraat’s drops, Syrian sky and a Botticellian vein from the heart.
 
A poppy of blood rises
Mirror of the slaughtered sun;
Its petals are lips of faded maps.
It will never know the taste of dew
Merchants traded its last drop
For a sky of blood
Now covering
Towns, trees,
Streets trying to shout from inside
The broken womb of the earth
She rises and rises with red droplets
In a place where the sunsets begin
In nooks where angels come to weep.
 
 
 
← Saima Afreen