Three Poems

Poetry by Saima Afreen

Memory

At dusk the sky always appeared

Prussian blue of a nerve running

over the rooftops of my hometown

dotted with bougainvillea and guava

trees. Maybe it always spoke to all

the tiny birds within our child-bodies

smelling of ripe fruits. Sometimes.

I want to shake an inky branch

in my memory, dip my fingers in

the darkening blue to listen to all

the chatter this fading sky has been

holding all these years.

Forecast

Maybe the weather within us is of breeze

that travels from ocean to ocean gathering

water till it cascades inside us lullaby-like.

Its sound is sometimes full of a language

we don’t understand and we feel our eye-

lids heavy, drooping—our body tired. Maybe

it was trying to make us asleep all this while,

the kind of sleep you get while crossing a river

during Monsoon, your belly full of rice and fish

as if the watery wind making sure you sleep well 

before you finally wake up in a far, far away land.

of rain, of orchestras

There’s no midnight hour in a pink

drink. It opens its atoms in a slow

dance from the mouth of the carafe

to the edge of your lips, to the harbor

of your belly that holds all the hours

waiting for its dark roof to be blown away

by an ice storm longing to live deep, deep

inside a forest, a forest with no fairies, no

flowers. A forest growing around all the burial

you have been engaged in but have not tended

to. They don’t speak but move within, rise to the roof

refusing to collapse. They are in need of a forest

in need of the rain that doesn’t fill the cup

you’re holding in a pub listening to the orchestra

as you were seeing flowerheads that children see

before they fall asleep, their hands calling the birds

to peck at your heart, to make it talk to dark forests

Photo by Deep Shikha

BIO: Saima Afreen is a poet, abstract expressionist, and teaching-artist. She authored poetry collection Sin of Semantics and a chapbook Winter Biomythography. Her works have been published across West Europe, North America, South Asia, and Australia. She was Charles Wallace Fellow for Creative Writing at the University of Kent, the UK.