We have all, at some time or another been overwhelmed, overpowered, bested by our grief, anxiety and wretchedness. At those times, some of us have also been lucky enough to have that one place where we have, for a while, found some degree of quietude and peace. This is a tribute to those secret little places and spaces of comfort and healing in our lives.
There is this wooden bench I like It’s not fancy, quite the common type Cloaked in by the dappled canopy Of a gracefully pirouetting Mara tree It sits in the park like a dear old friend Its well-worn embrace ever welcoming A young couple walks up, caught in the grips of wrath Love is lost, it’s the wretched aftermath Words are exchanged until the fury’s spent Frustration - Anxiety - Sadness - Silence Then they sit downon the wooden bench … Slowly muscles relax and nerves untense Even if it is a passing interlude Loads are lightened, hearts are soothed.
Wild flowers grow lushly around its feet Bobbing bright heads to earth’s vital beat The bench sits there like a quiet friend It’s well-worn seat ever welcoming A man sits down in a state of unease Holding on to his hat in an errant breeze He picks up his phone and looks at the screen The unlit glass reflects the tranquil scene … He looks up and around him his brow somewhat eased Fleeting albeit, he’s found his moment of peace.
Songful birds and their terrestrial friends Roam warbling and chittering around the bench Hoping for a serendipitously fallen treat They browse busily around the seat A wheelchair-bound man looks up at an overcast sky His female companion already has water in her eyes They sit side by side in worlds of their own Reminiscence weighs heavy of days that are gone A mynah trills as a light drizzle falls And a sweet petrichor briefly dispels the pall … The man looks at her, takes her hand and she smiles For now they’re alright, tomorrow is still a while.
I too have sat in nature’s restoring arms On that bench where she weaves her alchemical charms I too have unburdened my hopes and my fears I too have laid my bursting heart bare And I have heard her soothing murmurs That have quietened my deepest despair I’ve looked into her soft eyes from that corner in the park For a time, my soul too has emerged from the dark … The clouds have parted, the sun has shone through And I’ve breathed more easily, sitting on that wooden pew.
This is a tribute to all the women in fact who are oppressed, reduced and shamed in the name of religion, and who still find the strength and dignity to go on another day.
O Talib*, O ye self-professed Learned One,
I have something to say to you. You can whip up monsters from the air and call them your Shariah*. You can torture and mangle “your” women, break their spirits and their bodies and call it the Word of God. You can wear your imperious lungee* and as it swishes around in the wind, you imagine the very angels dancing around you. You grow your hairy beards, and hide your malevolent grins behind them. You rumble and you roar and that is your devotion. You maim and you kill and you call that Divine intervention.
But then secretly you also glance at your reflections and you see what we all see: imperfect, angry, reviled men trying to validate their existence in the only way they can - by wiping the planet clean of the scourge of the Double (H)Ex*. But then you pause with the greatest effort known to the Men of God and you think: How can we annihilate this evil, garbed in soft flesh if we are to propagate and procreate? How else are we to add to the rank and file of Allah’s soldiers?
The conundrum is excruciating. So you continue to brutalize and ravage just short of pushing her six feet under. Just so you can crush her under you instead and make her pay for staying alive. To bear and to beget your many sons. To nurture and feed your rabid army of the Men of Allah.
O Ye Men of Allah,
I have something to say to you. Hear me.
I am the Daughter of the Universe; the Yin to your Yang, the ultimate balancing act of God’s will gone wrong in your hands.
Hear me. We will be who we are: the proud women of Afghanistan. Our honour lies serenely, supremely, completely in the depths of our own eyes, not in yours.
Look at me. Don’t hide behind your fragile male bravado. Look at me. Don’t turn your suddenly shameful eyes away.
Look at me. Look at me.
Look at me as I rise like a Phoenix from the ashes that you kicked aside. Look at me as I look at you. Look at me and see what you have become. Look at me as your heart Drains … Shrivels …. Breaks …. Burns in its own hell.
Hear me, my voice will echo through my sisters even if mine falls silent. You will Hear me.
Look at me, even if it is at my corpse as I go to meet my Maker. You will Look at me.
For Allah hears me. For Allah sees me.
Allah stands behind me as we both look at you. As we both await you.
The “Where is My name” campaign. Laleh Osmany campaigning to have the mother’s name included in the birth certificate.Her study centre was bombed. But Shamsiya, a Coal miner’s daughter still tops in Afghan University entrance exam“A strong woman is a woman determined to do something others are determined not be done.” – Marge Piercy
* Double (H)Ex: Word play on the double X chromosomes that all female mammals possess. Hex is a spell or a curse.
* Talib: Scholar; Learned one.
* Shariah: Islamic law derived from the teachings of the Quran but mainly from the Prophet Muhammad. It is not a list of rules but rather a set of principles on aspects of life, including marriage, divorce, finance and rituals such as fasting and prayer.
I wake up today There’s a keening in my heart It sits there familiarly Waiting for me To take its hand and walk with it Feel its ardor, talk to it Make it wholly, soully mine
But the lethargy that is life Has been pulling for a while At my seams, they’ve come undone I cannot find it in me now To acknowledge this someone This something that looks at me With glowing eyes, dark and deep
I stay aware of it But like a balm I keep it topical Let it rouse me for a while With dreams of higher things Dire things, of touching lives Even a few, maybe just two Or even just one …
But now I have also learnt To preserve myself That strain of goodness Stands no chance In the dulling sludge of circumstance And a will that’s willowy Bendable, collapsible And so when it stares at me A cosmos of possibilities I look away But I stay aware Of its unsettling symmetry
It’s easier this way As the days spill Into each other Unremarkable I tell myself at least I’m not Doing anything to hurt the lot Humankind, neighbours, the child Snotty-nosed running wild In the streets where a mother sits On the pavement resigned Circled by dead dreams and things Spaces that once gleamed with hope And all the while I tell myself At least my intentions are good.
This poem is written from 2 separate perspectives of 2 different people sitting in a cafe. Oftentimes, in our beautiful world, inner and outer imperfections can become calming, comforting and even uplifting.
I see her in the cafe She’s sitting on her own Like me A cup of coffee Rests in front of her Lines huddle in the space between her brows They’re furrowed now In some private grief or anxiety Only her cup knows for sure As she stares into the darkness within Her lips tremble for a moment Just a bit. She takes a quick sip Of the vitalising potion Swallowing her emotions Down they both go The sadness and the coffee Lingering on the inside now I feel my heart go out to her It hovers around her table Softly, silently, wordlessly I want to follow too But we are strangers It wouldn’t do She looks up. She sees me I smile and then I look away guiltily Outside the window And then down at my own cup of tea
I see her looking at me Just a glance, a little look Then away from the nook I am sitting at But that little exchange is everything Even in that whisper Of a gaze, that smile I feel her compassion Shimmering around me Gently, silently, comfortingly I look at her as she sits there In her wheelchair Reminding me that frailty Is never on the outside Her own courage shining bright Has skipped across the room Transforming into a tenderness Shattering my spell of gloom My heart lifts and wafts out to her I want to follow after But we are strangers I turn back to my cup And I smile I hesitate just for a while And then I beam across the room to her My heart now light with gratefulness Lit up by a beautiful stranger
Life is like a box of chocolates Someone once said Sometimes you get The caramel-drenched centres That melt in the mouth Like liquid satin, swishing on your tongue In silky, sweet tones Caressing your taste buds until Languidly, unhurriedly They lavish one last nectarous kiss Before disappearing In ambrosial bliss Down the tunnel of your throat
At others it’s the bitterness of a centre That’s dark - 90% cacao That unleashes on your tongue Spearing, laughing, spearing again Inflicting a bitter-sweet pain Just enough for you to stop and think To wonder if this is good A revelation Of taste, an experience That’s bold, distinct To recall, to remember when You’re short on inspiration Or whether in fact It is an assault no less On the mundaneness The safeness On your everydayness Plodding on your tongue Like a thug that’s sold His essence, his soul To the gods of gastronomic Absurdity and virulence
I look back, the rhyme is longer For the bitterness that lingers In the mouth; but I have also realized That my taste buds have conspired With my mind to bind Most of the time To memories that are wholesome Sugared, caramelised So even when I pick A chocolate from life’s mix I hope for the sweetness The toffiness, the bliss But I also sit in readiness For the wave of bitterness That sometimes takes me in its grip But always itinerant Shifting, moving on And so I too go on Savouring Every piece, never wavering From the cholocate box of life.
The blue-purple sky today Has spent its moisture-ladenness It is now cloaked in quietness Its sadness it has put away In some clouded corner that Will hold it, hide it tenderly For now it wears a lighter heart Star-smeared, it now gleams Wetly with nostalgia A tender melancholia I look at it as it glimmers Stalwart in its eternalness Its timelessness, its ceaselessness I yearn for that serenity That noiselessness, that peacefulness I take in a ragged breath All my grief sits in my chest Heaving, cleaving achingly Endlessly, relentlessly I look at the resolute sky At its crush of dewy stars Valiantly twinkling at me And I look away Tonight I don’t feel brave enough To let the shimmering cloak of night Take me into its embrace Away, away from my sad place. It moved its glutted grief today The sorrowing, water-laden sky And I have in my wretchedness Made it my own this starry night.
If I could live another life with you I’d talk of a few more things More palpably, more honestly with you Of things that gnawed At my mind; at the way my gut wrenched Balling up inside, or even when The pit of my belly dissolved In a fluttering crush of butterflies I’d speak of love light-footed and pure The kind that knocks you to the floor And the next instant pins shimmering wings On your tingling spine so you can fly High high, breath-catchingly high!
I’d talk of heartbreaks too That shred the organs into little bits Where the pain ripples in screaming peals My thoughts marking time with the cacophony Where I stumble on my own feet Where I want to just lie down and feel Nothing for a while I’d share secrets that I have held deep inside Now frozen, frigid, petrified Mute scars of speechless agonies Never named, never identified
I’d also tell you that I loved My quiet, my solitude When it was just me in my room Or just you and me Sipping tea In the lounge, watching tv And then I’d tell you about the things That would make my tone-deaf heart sing A constant humming underneath Beneath the sheath of my skin Of peace that was soothing, softening Of flame-bright hope and quiet joy
I’d talk to you Of beginnings and of endings too Some tragic some tender Of sometimes going under But always re-surfacing, I would Talk of spirituality, the ethereal kind That makes the hair stand on end The kind that quickens your breath That makes life and even death A fleeting, splendorous enterprise A mystical trip with no finish line
And when your time here or mine Was drawing to a close Together we would Strum those notes One last time Of all the things that we’d talked about And all the times that we had spent And then I’d have held your hand in mine We would have laughed and we would have cried And we would have laughed again Because nothing would have been left Unsaid, unfelt at the end.
Oh look at that beautiful dragonfly It’s turning somersaults Its peacock coloured gossamer wings Perfect, without fault! But you didn’t catch the fleeting glimpse It bestowed upon this scene You were on your phone lost in Digital worlds upon your screen
Did you see that butterfly Just sit upon my arm Brown and orange-yellow wings It was full of golden charm! You missed its quickening beauty As it said hello and went You were caught in your own loop Eyes down, heart still, head bent
I had to hold my breath there That scene was so sublime The grand eagle swooping down And then soaring back up high! Where, where? you ask me now As you look at an empty sky You were fretting, agitating As nature sprang her wondrous surprise
Glittering dragonflies, murmurations Eagles in majestic flight A shower of blossoms, a ladybird loveliness Nature exulting in life Magical, mystical, shimmering marvels Surround us at all times Some of us get to revel in their beauty Some stay trapped by Sentinel Time
It’s so soakingly humid That I swim on the pavements I glide Through the waves of moisture Like an eel, No, like a duck in water Submerged, breathing through new-fangled gills A chimerical, mystical thing The stuff of science fiction and ETs In a universe of visions and dreams Morphing, dissolving, changing Even as I wade on
When I bring a glass to my lips To quench a thirst that sits Uneasily, timorously in my throat There, but not really there More habit-driven than the need To drench a parched desert inside my skin I swim into the water Like a goldfish, lips turgid Gut kicking against the liquid intrusion But the impulse of living Compels me to sip, sip, sip Until I think I’ve had enough
When I dress in the morning Each garment feels like cellophane Stuck tightly to me, I’m cling-wrapped Even though each begins its day airily Lightly. I look at myself in the mirror My forehead is already wet In the heat of protest Against the layers I must don Linen - lying-in wait to suffocate Cotton - caught-on my liquified bones Fabric, propriety, a proper-riot Of ceaseless stickiness More fabric, more properness I ignore the tangled wrangle within I now wear also my morning smile Even as my upper lip glistens With the sweat of struggle Ageless now, muscle-memorized I step onto the pavement To swim, swim, swim In my designated line.
Mahvash Mohtadullah 