the doors of my home and the reflection of windows.

24 July, 2019. Effervescent.

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This air has a persistent feeling of death.
I can hear cries of mothers. Their wail is loud enough to choke the molecules around my ear
yet I keep my eyes on the wall
and watch the bricks falling.

Sitting inside a home feels worse when spring is falling asleep.
On the tender branch of the neem tree
I hang my poem about bitterness
Sitting inside a home feels good when winter is approaching.

To the world around my ribcage, I might be a heartbroken lover
but for the world around my eyes, I am just another sadist.
I talk of the lost love and the new lover together.
People call me a cheater
I only hear the cries.

What is meant to begin will mark an ending.
but on the broken rib cage inside humans, there will always be a silence.
The silence that won’t become a burden
unless you start talking about it.

I didn’t mean to write. I didn’t want to write.
The reasons for this poem are lost in translations where Urdu is read as Persian and almost each one of us understands.
Apparently, pain has no language.
It isn’t written but felt.

Death.
This air has a breath of children lost in the war.
This home has a coffin where I put mothers.
After the dusk breaks into the night
I make a graveyard of cries and bury everything in my eyes.

Death.
I lie on my deathbed, a coffin made of flowers.
I ask a lover to kiss me for the last time
and when he does my mouth transfers everything that carried no weight
_ the spring of 1997 (I wasn’t even born)
_ the winter of 2015 (I didn’t feel like living)
_the last piece of my heart (the only thing that breathes)

Of all the things that are weightless hurt comes from the one we carry inside our hearts exchanging for words we can’t write.

©Sameera Mansuri 2020.

Words and the picture belongs to The Poetic Elixir.