Silver… razor sharp tainted with red

The drops falling melancholically

To the bemoaning parched earth

I double over with a piercing ache

Falling with the dripping red

I feel the pain, not in the gnawing wound

But in my heart…

You were my part-my blood yours

Your life nourished in mine

Yet Kari you cry…

My Son?

The silent night reverberates

With a thunderous gunshot

The wicked phantoms of death

Dance madly to its tune

The bolt tears right through my soul

I succumb to the blinding pain

Shrouding my listless heart

You were my playmate…

I taught you to walk

Yet Kari you cry…

My Brother?

The benevolent warm eyes

Once glittering with love

Now seethe with venom!

You have condemned me forever

Without a word?

Without a thought…

You were my sire

I your daughter

Yet Kari you cry…

My Father?

Just like that all ties of love

Wither away into the gaping

Nothingness…

For I’m marked for life

By your honour and pride

Desecrated… by your

Outraged cries of contempt

Now to each one of you

Kari is all that I am!

Atonement

By Aroosa Mushtaq Malik

My cries will go unheard,

My pleas, unnoticed.

My lament will not heal it,

My tyranny ails my beloved.

Sentimental though I am,

Conceited, I see.

My wistfulness will not be rewarded,

Still I am keen.

It is an inevitable truth,

My affliction.

Quiet, I am though

Because of my heart’s premonition.

I am told my endearments

Would not bring my lover back.

Weary I am now from thoughts

Of what my love lacked?

Maybe I was not good enough,

Maybe I never showed.

Maybe I never surrendered,

Before my lover, I never bowed.

My tears of resentment

Will now go on wasted.

For instead of Love in my lover’s heart,

I have provoked hatred.

Though this may not be the end,

Our chapter might not have finished.

I beg You, do not let it go cold,

Do not let our Love diminish.

Forgive me, My Beloved!

As death has not yet reached our doors.

As life lingers,

There still might be hope!

The Call

By Zara Mansoor

What voice I hear, what strange echo,

What sound doth summon me,

To murky mysteries unforetold,

And dark as dark can be.

As if I see the sacred souls,

Of mystic cave dwellers,

As if I hear the furtive words,

Of somber secret tellers.

Or perhaps in a far off moor,

All wild with wilderness,

Some witch-like shade chants eerie charms,

With hints for me to guess.

Or has the mighty starry sky,

Bowed down its head so low,

That I may peer into the space,

To see a misty show.

But wait the call comes not from far,

But from my inner breaths,

And now I lose me to myself,

And drown in my own depths.

Hope

By Fatima Batool

I stand here, lost

In the heart of a gothic graveyard

My pulse quickened;

Heart in my mouth-unnerved

By the bats’ sudden maddening screeches,

A chill running up my spine

And mind clueless; where to go?

Abruptly, on my shoulder, I feel

The bones of a slender hand

I doth not dare

Turn around, but dart away

Groping my way in the maze of darkness

I topple over a grave, and a soul

Lends me its hand…

Unaware of the circumstances ahead,

I feel a tiny flicker of adherence,

I take the immortal hand,

And continue ahead,

But tears of despair bedew my cheeks

As I gaze at a river,

The river of woes and gloom,

Of vice and sinister ghosts

The silvery raging waters, crashing against rocks,

And a cascade falling roughly,

Into the watery depths below -

No choice awaiteth me

The deceased, everywhere!

But as the chasing demon nears me

I shut my eyes

And jump in

The flame in my heart getting stronger still,

I gently float above the waves

Consoled, as a new ray grips me,

The ray of bliss and hope,

And my soul drifting towards eternity,

With a start, I wake up -

Solaced as though,

Blessed again

With a gift like ‘life’!

- Compiled by NA

Live the Questions!

“Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

- Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Letters to a Young Poet’

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