To Find Yourself One Must Whirl
that doesn’t mean you wear tattered clothes and threads hang bearing the weight of your
conscience. See yourself as an open chest,
gaping hole leading ubiquitously. Ponder the
soles of feet treading the sound of truth, but
truth does not lie beneath nor in the deepest
parts of cupped palms, chalice carries nothing
but sin. Still, align a few hands and foot to the
right, you will witness mercy descends from
this juncture. Now raise the inner soul of dress
as high as the hoopoe sings. Going back is no
state, where circles were round and rounds were
drunk. Wet wilderness grew beneath bulwark of
skin, life begins here or does it end? You peel
back layers of history as if skin, taking stock of every matter, molecule: then came man. You,
reduced to darkness against light that burns like a lamp for company. O’ lost soul, drunk
qalandar, dance like a hubris star, let the dark hold you like a limpet, piece by piece
shadow by shadow.
Sheena Hussain is a British Pakistani poet, essayist and cancer advocate from the UK. A non-practising immigration lawyer who turned to poetry after receiving a cancer diagnosis. Subsequently, she self-published a collection of poems, whilst recovering, titled “Memories of a Poet, My Road My Recovery”; her latest book includes “Covid-19 Poems from a Pandemic”. She is the founder of Poem:99, a national children’s poetry competition. She is widely anthologised. She is a member of Inscribe-Peepal Tree Press’s writer’s development programme and the recipient of the DYCP Award from ACE, 2021.
Comments