by: Imran Khan
Imran Khan’s poems externalize memory and perception, locating both in the landscape so that the experience of place and of self (and other) are inextricably linked as though the layers of geological time sing our stories back to us.
Cleaving
Our horizon died easily,
but I still finger the splice of it. Your
departure echoed along the fringe reef,
my denial stirred grass
beneath the surface.
Now I cling to corals
like they’re answers to questions
which fill me like wine.
Waiting for the sky to open,
we are pounding water
no longer bound to one sea.
The Sketcher, Hyderabad
Do you remember that kid
sketcher,
rogue
diamond fire, the
prayer
he………..smeared
over shop fronts
until
Anger knifed the walls shut.
A lens clenched its teeth
tutted……………………….twice
the kid let in the dark,
they swept it
under their carpet
that night.
A wall blushed
and the little boy climbed up
lips stiff as chalk
he rose.
Pointing………………..at………………..God.
Imran Khan received his MA from SOAS and delivers workshops for Amnesty International. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Seventh Wave, Thomas Hardy Journal, DoveTales and other literary journals. Khan has won a Thomas Hardy Award for poetry.
First impressions: poems like puffs of smoke. I can’t find their shape before they change. Do they mean something? Do they have to? They have a great quality of inwardness. Do I like them? Do I have to? They are like faint markings on a cave wall, barely decipherable. Yet I believe the poet. I believe his conviction. And there are some very beautiful images.