Baba

By Esha

Baba, you taught me the power of pen and letter

The smell of the book, yellowed with age

The golden dust with every turn of the page

The contented sigh of finishing a book

The possessiveness of a new book cradled in my arms.

Yet, you neglected to tell me

Of the feverish desperation to till to the end

The grief at every character's death

The tears of joy at a happy ending

The torturous reflection on one's own soul.

Perhaps you hoped I would stand tall

But I can't, Baba.

I am burdened by the ghosts of writers long ago

With the hunger of answers to unanswerable

questions,

My soul burns with the anguish of forgotten books

The books that have ever graced the Earth

The souls of the forgotten writers beckon to me,

Invite me in their midst

I have one foot in their realm yet I am held back by strings

Mere strings, yet so powerful

If I immerse myself in that world, I will be forever lost to you

If I reject them, I will forever be lost to myself.

Famous last words

Elizabeth Barrett Browning: “Beautiful.”

Robert Burns: “Don’t let theawkward squad fire over my head!”

Lord Byron: “Come, come, no weakness! Let’s be a man to the last!”/“Now, I shall go to sleep.”

Emily Dickinson: “I must go in; the fog is rising.”

John Keats: “I can feel the daisies growing over me.”

Christina Rossetti: “I love everybody. If ever I had an enemy, I should hope to meet and welcome that enemy to heaven.”

The illusion of love

by Sara Batool

We live in a messy, mad world.

Years of love are forgotten,

In a minute of hatred.

That burden of hatred strangulates love.

And man becomes trapped in chaos

The chaos that is created by sheer creativity

Because maybe there was merely an illusion

of love,

And that illusion penetrates deep,

Carving wounds in the heart,

Leaving the heart alone

In the darkness of heartache.

This heartache aggravates with every heartbeat

And forces that wounded heart

To live

And endure.

And all of this chaos

Is the price of

One tiny minute of hatred,

One great illusion of love.

On a frosty winter night

Ali Asghar Ghani

On a frosty winter night

under an old mapple tree

the black wind dances with

forgotten songs of the past

Compiled by SK