LORE
At dusk, the women come to the courtyard
between the huts and cast stories around the fire
feeding on the slow roast of their days. Time to forget
the heavy sun they carried for hours,
rattling in dry pitchers, until they flushed it out
at the nearest well two villages away. Now,
in the night, they pull thorns from their tread
and tuck secrets down each other’s breasts
while the men sleep off moonshine and truck shifts.
The crones pass on their lives to the tribe
and teach gypsy girls how to curve flesh against
stropping desert winds without mislaying themselves.
Clan songs of dusty lands with vulture skies
lift off the drum and swirl into constellations.
– Zakia R. Khwaja, The Legacy Project, SJC Bridges Out of Poverty, 2016.
THE MANGO TREE
I
The villagers mark time
by the angle of the mango tree’s
shadow across the square.
Its roots pulse like arteries under the village.
II
The elders argue politics, land
feuds and progress under
the leafy canopy. Mango slivers,
plucked from ice buckets, disappear
under drooping mustaches,
peels sucked white and clean.
The men work the fields.
III
Nearby, over mud-clay walls,
the women gossip, squalling
burdens clutched to hips.
Toddlers trip towards the chickens.
Fresh-rinsed dupattas flutter
in the breeze – crimson, orange, blue!
All breathe deep the air, redolent
with the incense of mango chutneys,
fruit-flesh bubbling on brick stoves.
IV
Impatient with writing slates,
sling-shotting comrades, we stare
longingly at the succulent fruit
bending the branches.
The teacher and the bees drone.
V
Every summer the tree grows
that one juicy, unblemished mango—
perfectly pulp-fattened.
How to sneak up and pin a name-slip
on that king of fruits? The race
to get the golden trophy.
Sometimes, the crows get to it first.
VI
Still, sticky evenings,
we corner Old Nani-Ma
on sun-toasted charpoys
till she spins dreams of sorcerers and
djinns, whose souls can be wrung
out of parrots sitting in mango trees.
– Zakia R. Khwaja, Grey Sparrow Journal, Winter 2012.
LUCIFERIN
A winged light-bringer, burning
the Day Star at its end, winks
through crepuscular rays.
All of night cannot mute
the brilliant cursor pulsing
at the base of grass-blades, appearing
in the shadowy triangles between
the maple leaves, now, a pin
jabbing at its golden reflection
in a puddle, pulling me to its alluring
halo until it hooks on my hair and
I flick it to the pavement.
– Zakia R. Khwaja, Ellipsis, 2012 Vol. 48.
SEEN
I notice
one of their child-folk today:
empty dinnerplate gaze,
bony fingers grasping
at my coattails. The rest
is sunken skin.
I hear
they exist at the interstice
of death and life; their language,
plaintive. If you roll back the concrete
edge of palaces, you can find
whole colonies swept under rich
patterns, peeking up
through tasseled fringes.
They crouch like dung
beetles on the refuse
thrown from turrets and
if you look them in the eye
you never sleep again.
I snag on the child, risen
from a crack in the sidewalk,
unflattened by careless
moccasins. I saw her
and now I see them all.
– Zakia R. Khwaja, The Aleph Review, Vol. 1, 2017.
NASTALIQ
Cat-lazy afternoons, my lead-smudged
fingers trace nastaliq script – a fusion of curling,
arcing Persian and geometric Kufic Arabic.
Straight-backed alif, big-bellied chey, the qaaf –
vocalized deep in the uvula – harsh, unlike the softer
kaaf; I give a turban to tey, a bindiya to zwad,
thinking of calligraphy in a Sadeqain, Faiz ghazals
sung by Noor Jehan, rhyming riddles and my grandfather
reading Urdu poetry, quizzing me on poets’ names.
Absorbed in eternal lines of nastaliq, entranced
like mystic sufis, I decipher God and Love and
Self until the sweaty, blunted pencil slants.
– Zakia R. Khwaja, Alabama Literary Review, 2011 Vol 20 Number 1.
JIDDOJOHAD
I read the Roznama Jang
to my grandfather’s cataracts,
seer-white in sunlight.
“JIDDojohad, not JADDojohad,” he corrects
as my eleven years struggle with the careful Urdu
of journalists, while beneath our feet
a secret basement press hums
words dying on tongues, welted off backs,
choked into cuffed hands.
A bulb sparks over democratized
print, ink-smudged fingers screw clean
from acetone-soaked muslin. Man-high piles
of foolscap lean against foundations. I learn
how to crease sentences into books
that get transported in the hushed dark
by tarp-covered wheelbarrows.