By Humzah Gilani
Edited by Alloe Mak

He is almost gone, he does not tell anymore
of the Partition
or fragmentation, the two selves
that split into (un)belonging
You weep for your father, in violent sorrow
in this language of a dream unremembered
perhaps that is why your grief announces itself
in this vocabulary of only turbulence.

I catch glimpses, fine tendrils like
the brown sari you draped over your shoulders
as amorphous as the sounds themselves
talking amidst the dinner table, the sidewalk
swarming with displaced
words gliding and weightless but still carrying
my incompetency, this plain fissure
severed by birth and its obligatory loss.

Our speech is soft, tender as
honeyed chausa, a succulence of origin
but you cry for your Abbu
in grim inelegance
you exclaim to me what is deathless—
Ghalib, Faiz Ahmed Faiz—
about ghazals, though I know only the script that haunted
the Raj, the ones who came as did I with
sonnets and ballads
Shakespeare and leaden clouds, none of the
heat or poetics of the monsoon dust.