Member-only story
From Air Hunger to Whalesong
~ a love poem for us~
When you touched me
it was like carnivorous
stealth of a lynx
breathing in my throat
to love you was
sunset flame and
dawnlike porphyry
when skies bowed
after emergent day
to kiss calyx and corolla
fiber and sap
root and limb.
That day,
I made a memorandum
— that I must live
within love’s witchcraft
not curlicues of smoke
on snowbound limbs or
slippery spirals of hooded
questions answers to which
seemed irrelevant
as if your fingertips
were God’s erasers
burnishing my soul
clean of a life lived on
the edge of lunar cycles.
I found
tongue and sight,
codes and hyroglyphs
sweetened with pollen
and I went
from air hunger to whalesong…
In my dreams
I see through a camera obscura
myself as an oracle
maddened by abandonment
and your cruel laughter
like a tight steel thread
exquisitely excruciatingly
executing my soul
Farida Haque
