POETS' CORNER

The cold earth slept below

By Percy Bysshe Shelley

The cold earth slept below;

Above the cold sky shone;

And all around,

With a chilling sound,

From caves of ice and fields of snow

The breath of night like death did flow

Beneath the sinking moon.

The wintry hedge was black;

The green grass was not seen;

The birds did rest

On the bare thorn’s breast,

Whose roots, beside the pathway track,

Had bound their folds o’er many a crack

Which the frost had made between.

Thine eyes glow’d in the glare

Of the moon’s dying light;

As a fen-fire’s beam

On a sluggish stream

Gleams dimly—so the moon shone there,

And it yellow’d the strings of thy tangled hair,

That shook in the wind of night.

The moon made thy lips pale, beloved;

The wind made thy bosom chill;

The night did shed

On thy dear head

Its frozen dew, and thou didst lie

Where the bitter breath of the

naked sky

Might visit thee at will.

Wistful winter

By Amna Ameer

There’s this missing feeling

Like how you feel when you miss a step

Or the way you lose track of your thoughts

How you forget the once precious gift from an estranged friend

The way you almost don’t remember how autumn smelt

The way your tongue keeps going to that gap of your fallen tooth

A space you know is there

But you need to feel it to remember

It isn’t there anymore

That’s how loneliness creeps in

Like a familiar sonnet

Or a lost haiku

In between pages of your old journal

Many pages are now ripped

And you wonder

Why is your heart yearning to feel?

The wistfulness that beholds every winter.

The winter night

By Zeba Aziz

The fragrance that comes

Before the winter arrives

Specially at night

The way it thrives

Accompanied aesthetically

By the calmness

Of the night

It makes the air

Aromatic and bright

It makes your soul

Crave something

So bad

It mixes altogether

The sad and happy

You

Then you forget what

To do

To mourn over the craving

Or to welcome the

Ecstasy in you

That entered your soul

With the get together

Of two;

the fragrance

Of the winter

And the calmness

Of the late hour

Compiled by SK