Questions Raised by the Wind
~a dialogue without punctuation~
Listen :
only a coward
chooses ignorance
over self-knowledge.
Fleeeting courage
brought me:
“I am greedy.”
Is that why
I feel
starved, eternally?
I talk
to myself as I
look at my face
reflected in a
reed-girdled pond
and I
Talk to myself.
Turquoise flick
of a dragonfly’s
tail,
a water boatman’s
dimpled passage
across cubist waters
punctuate this dialogue.
Listen:
Today self-loathing
dashes about my
insides like
a rat under
a thick
blind. blanket.
I look at my face —
It is a
mobile spill
of mulberry juice
full
of damsel flies.
Even nature must
live with its
aberrations.
embrace all abomination,
and I
am only human:
I made a mistake.
Forgive myself?
no, a thousand times
no!
Though the world
has forgiven
and forgotten,
marched on, I must do
penance
with a jagged speculum.
Pull out first,
sleepless nights,
then worlds of wonder
then desperate recollections,
my stillborn goslings
in a pallid rain.
I look at my face with a
dung fly’s
compound eye:
I look away.
All that I love
sits in
judgement.
Hoary-eyed trees
point fingers,
answer
the call of sprawled
iguana
mountain ranges
that freeze-burn with
Slitted stares.
Forgive myself?
Perhaps.
What does it matter
that my giddy flight
dipped
over a freak volcano that
blackened sweet
blue-water visions?
I will still
ride on
questions raised
by the
wind,
on revelations
whispered
in the flamenco
ear of a hibiscus,
though judgement’s
pitiless sun
thunders down,
blanches all compassion,
suffocates all love.
Listen:
only a coward
chooses ignorance
over self-knowledge.
Farida Haque
