by: Rizwan Akhtar
Rizwan Akhtar’s poetry celebrates and laments a broken world in equal measure. Never letting the reader forget that to read a poem is to enter a construction site, one in which the building will never entirely completed, these poems find love in the fragmented recognition of our unique interdependence: “besides memory much is spent/ to achieve a decent closure// to clarify that it is more than love/ we are such crisis.”
Our Timing is Bad
for Grey
On a cloud-driven day unrhymed wind
made windows quiver, you managed
short spells of typing and me from obscure
angles bent and bold with each click and huff
heart leaped from the custody of conventions
and drafts written by eyes unaware of rules
of a sustained argument, composure
was the way of blocking storm of
interpretations, exhausted we scrolled
our respective shells, ill-timed
we were supposed to conclude.
The Crisis
The predictable sounds come and go
only echoes swallowed by traffic
remind me that I have left you to wait
under that dusty cloud of city
where a mature crow leaves his cluster
mocking the idea of home
built on mere words and silence
leading to usual bickering
five fingers one face two eyes project
a huddle in dark corner for two people
besides memory much is spent
to achieve a decent closure
to clarify that it is more than love
we are such crisis.
Rizwan Akhtar works as an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Punjab University, Lahore, Pakistan. He completed his PhD in postcolonial literature from the University of Essex, UK in 2013. He has published poems in well-established poetry magazines in the UK, US, India, Canada, and New Zealand. He has also completed a five week workshop on poetry with Derek Walcott at the University of Essex in 2010.
