Green Bench
An expression doesn’t just come about.
It is first inhaled, lingered at the nostrils,
then transferred to the tongue
where before being processed,
the palate performs a founding ritual
by, firstly, letting it float a few seconds
in the closed mouth, whisking it
and then allowing it to sediment gracefully
into the body of the open buds.
An expression is like a practised recipe.
It cannot be served untried to the tables
of veteran maxims, a High Court of Supremes,
robed deliberators en-tasked for banishing frivolity
from staunchly guarded books of Language.
Their palates may be bland to change
but, an expression can be a possibility
to experimentation; sitting solo at this green bench
on a green day of an excitedly buzzing green park,
barely in contemplation, in utter deliriousness,
I whim upon the act of teleporting
I inhale mouthfuls of the rain-scented air,
the green becoming an enormously magnificent vision,
my mind strays towards clichés
entrapping the overused modicum (of a colour)
unexplored in its robust conceptuality.
I lick the roof of my mouth, the taste seems right.
How delightfully queer for thoughts to float
in the unreached expansive universe,
chancing upon a fertile cell of a mind
to impregnate with what isn’t originally its own
writing out secrets of an unknown
green bench.
Perhaps
Spring is like a perhaps hand – E. E. Cummings
If Spring would spring from my perhaps hand,
I would dip its nib in the cobalt ink of a night sea
and find green re-birthing leaves painted on
cobblestoned walls in a romantic alleyway
of an old forgotten Italy; all of the flowers
in my life would bloom in grandmother vases
where summer stoves would practise staying alight
under the dancing skirts of a linen breeze, my skin
would cosy against fresh smelling grass growing
on mountains behind a cardinal horizon of lovers
where my house would be a limestone igloo of doves
on which a sparkling silver sunlight would shimmer
its curves; in my mind I would live the spring
of change – the falsely autumned winters,
the change long overdue
and watering the seeds.
Impasse
The hour of grief brings epiphany,
like an intervention of the high
orders who send you a satiating
drink from the moon’s soothed
river, and in that limpid clasp of
tomorrow’s day, you see pebbles
turned to a path of feathers,
the brow’s heaviest perspiration
wiped by cool cloths of hands
of furling breezes, wrapping
your body in a fogless calm
that has never known burning;
it is possible for a human to cry
tears of gratitude for a thing past,
let the world stop for that hour –
in deadlock –
let the chest exhale, breathe only
light, the oil of liberated skin.
Sheikha A. is from Pakistan and United Arab Emirates. Her work appears in over 60 literary venues such as Ygdrasil, A New Ulster, Rose Red Review, Wilderness House Literary Review, The Penmen Review, Mad Swirl, Open Road Review, ken*again, Shot Glass Journal, Right Hand Pointing and many more. She has had her poems appear in several anthologies by different presses, most recent being Silver Birch Press and Kind of a Hurricane Press. Her work is upcoming in The Stray Branch, Halcyon Days, Indiana Voice Journal to name a few. She edits poetry for eFiction India.
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