A’mai — A Poem by Mirum Quazi

[et_pb_heading title="A’mai" _builder_version="4.27.4" _module_preset="default" max_width="600px" module_alignment="center" custom_margin="||57px|||" global_colors_info="{}" theme_builder_area="post_content"][/et_pb_heading]

“The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration.”

― T.S. Eliot

Crescendo

Usually a nagging interval, a lag, or a minor setback,
you can even call it a gap.
Always involuntary, sometimes insistent,
like metrical pauses— if life
were a long verse.
Once though,
and only once,
a hiccup
(tiny as a yarrow)
punctuates,
and swallows the world.
Moutuk hyuk, says my mother,
Death’s hiccup.
As though the moment
were not a final indication but an emissary
of fate itself
or a divine sign.
But we forged a terrifying escort
a doula for death
with innumerable wings,
ten thousand limbs and a thousand eyes,
only a hiccup
wouldn’t make sense otherwise.

Chimes

Expect maybe below the gallows tree
or on the boards, reenacting tragedies
the dying are brief and wonted
with a crispness that denies the conclusion it’s due.
Yet they peal without end
as if our heads were conch shells
and last words
were an ocean of knells.

These sonorous moorings—
earworms crawling
the green tree of recollection.

put her down, she wants to sleep
why won’t you let her sleep?

If I hold her hard enough
Death’s vines will limp away
and she will speak again,
and I will have more bells.

Cache

“Mira”
Faces receding
like thin tufts of clouds
shifted shapes and perished
without you naming them.
Yet you called me still.
I was told memory is a house
only the foundation
survives the mute nibbling
of time.
I wonder if I was the cantilevered deck
where no moon moped
or a silly rickety window
of days long gone
and the wreckage
that remained.

Caper

Meanwhile, it was sullen summer
and I was a puppeteer
bracing your arms like strings.
A sad marionette.
Death, you said,
is always on the horizon.
There, on the brink of the haunt
I had only seen crows disappear.

Circuity

Under the prim solar noon
tortuous locks busy the wee
treenware passed down
from your mother pocked
now with sly orbs
of mercury sliding
on the spine falling
through the teeth
on old crinkled newspapers as black
braiding ropes eddy around your
lithe auburn greys
and pull me by the fingers
to the edge.
Is it the memory that asks
or is it me?

Cat

I would nestle close to you
a mimsy blue being.
Speak your memories.
Tell me what the world was like before me.
Back then, did people die
and how cheap
was a bag of rice?
Why did your father carry
pouches of tea in his pockets?
In winter
why do vegetables
dangle on nails
outside windows?
Why does the house creak
and why do the winds wail?
It was here I wore the crown
for a moment.
Some nights I hoped
I was your story.
Tell me I too, lived
a past
I could make sense of.
Once in your naked tales
a woman was pushed
to her death
and bitter stones
drizzled from the sky.
I too wanted to live
in a world
where justice rained.

Credo

When someone dies in your arms
they thereafter become twigs
of reluctance. Love
cradled like a brimming teacup.
The Stoics lie.

Coda

She sits perched
in a familiar corner
peppy sparrow-like
legs tucked close
back arched, only slightly,
with her terracotta face
furrowed still,
so many furrows as if a branch
of rivulets had dried out,
pale marbled hands rest
unstirred on her
suppliant knees.
This is a dream.
It is snowing outside,
and I am hexing footprints
as I count them.
She runs her hands
on my head
and tells me I was growing hefty shucks for hair
and asks me about my loathing for combs.
She lovingly scolds me for snapping
wicker sticks on her fat rooster-like kanger
as I fiddle with sooty embers.
She laughs with her mouth closed
everytime I ask her
about my grandfather
whom I never met.
She wonders out loud
about the crooning mendicant who
would visit her every Friday, asking
for loose change and
a cup of rice.
She doesn’t remember that she is dead,
nor that he died before her.
I don’t either.
Soon she will reach for her pocket,
and I will wake up
in it.