Between Dialects

by Saba Zahoor

The city speaks to me 

switching between dialects,

words borrowed from 

Arabic, Persian and Sanskrit;

each syllable reiterating my displacement.

I belong interspersed in a space–

betwixt here, and elsewhere.

Power Gov! *–

the earliest memory of my mother tongue–

hiding in the roof of my mouth,

poised to spill forth

like the pea in a whistle.

The city’s seven sister kadals** stutter,

tongues thick with unsaid words.

They sing instead:

weeping in happiness, exulting in grief–

the funeral laments

inextricable from wedding chorus.

A man sells the city’s past

engraved on bronze plates

along streets where houses creak

in dead dialects,

windows no one remembered to close,

open to the draught of abandonment.

Another wanders, hunting old bookstores 

through the chrome grotesqueries of the new.

One part of me mends watches older than memory,

another already dreams in traffic lights.

*Power gov, kashmiri phrase meaning ‘electricity is out’.

**kadal, bridge

BIO: Saba Zahoor is an engineer, born in Kashmir and currently living in Saudi Arabia. She is a self-styled peasant poet who views poetry as a portal to alternate realities.