Poems forever
The Poet
A moody child and wildly wise
Pursued the game with joyful eyes,
Which chose, like meteors, their way,
And rived the dark with private ray:
The overlelapt the horizon’s edge,
Searched with Apollo’s privilege;
Through man and women, and sea, and star
Saw the dance of nature forward far;
Through worlds, and races, and terms, and times
Saw musical order, and pairing rhymes.
Excerpted from The Poet by Ralph Waldo Emmerson
Meeting at
Midnight: Her
By Suhd Nazeer
The overwhelming dread seen and felt
The same that Helen of Troy oft feared,
The distant gongs of midnight donged
While waiting for the pointy prow.
With mischief in her bosom bored
she left and dropped the epistle behind
As her feet through the fields hurried
into an old fashioned farm and waited,
Before old age could dribble through her dreadlocks,
A faint knock at the pane and calling
of her name in a hushed voice, she lighted
The candle and the two hearts lit with it.
Crave
By Bushra Mustafa
Little hands spreading in awe;
Echoes of the pouring rain,
Tuned the little girl to the majestic melody,
Touched her soul to the deepest levels.
Ecstatic, she whirled around in unalloyed joy,
Rhythms. Fantasy. Serenity.
Somewhere, dreamy eyes tangled ‘em into words.
After summer
By Rutaba Tanvir
Take caution, my child,
Till the vacant frost breaks,
Let the icicles collapse,
And the sun gleam,
For once the river flows,
You will be allowed a dive,
Deemed to be singular.
Take caution, my child,
No man steps in the same river twice,
And returns the same,
Heraclitus says so himself
A wrinkle births,
On what is left of your skin,
Long after summer ends.
Reasons for
3AM keypad silence
By Haseeb Sultan
I can scream at myself in the mirror,
But I don’t think I have ever done that.
I fear I might get too loud.
Not because the sound of my crying
Will go to my neighbor’s house.
I fear that in my big, hallowed, hollow house
the silence of my empty chat bar
and the dust covered, untouched keyboard
might wake my parents up.
The nights are mine.
So I let my mother sleep
And my father snore
as my pericardium holds tight my heart
that’s been growing since
My roommate first kicked my belly fat
when I failed my last exam.
I can only grow so much.
The night can only stay so long.
I think I’ll wait for the birds to come chirp
when I throw some rice grains for them
at dawn.
And when the crows will caw to fight the sparrows
I’ll let them muffle
Every controlled heart beat,
so that my body cannot give away
I am sad.
Beauty and the beast
By Asma Zainab
Collecting wild flowers and sunsets,
I came across life as a rare beauty
And through heartbreak and death
Is how the beast I met
Woes of a weary heart
By Zarmeen Khalid
Do you remember the times?
Love came to two wanderers
To blossom the fire
That scorched hearts
Like an omen of compassion
From utopias afar
I confess it, my beloved!
Time changes
Hard to believe...
Bleak to disregard...
Love still sobs
Irony laughs
When grief whispers in my ears
‘Till death do us apart!’
Compiled by SK
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