I like the shore.

I like its brokenness, its cacophony.

The overturned pot of gold

at the end of rainbows, and

human fantasies.

I like how it never changes,

but is never the same.

Like us, maybe,

our shallow heartbeats.

 

and I have liked

the shape of footprints, and

listening to seashells

by an unfathomable sea.

Where the world ends and begins again,

in slow breaths, in ecstasy.

 

and I see

the shadows of men and their impossible dreams

forgotten in the bottomless blue,

with broken ships and buried treasures,

all wrapped in fish and seaweed.

I see phantoms from olden days still looking

for those gleaming hearts of oysters,

and I wonder,

if they really exist, but how

it doesn’t really matter.

 

and I have liked

this whole affair of living and dying,

of forever wanting god,

whatever it might be.

The sun sets

stretched in the sky,

and I’m reminded of how much I have been in love

with the bones of men,

their vulnerability,

with a beautiful death,

and a dying sun.

 

There is nothing more we love

than that we ourselves create.

 

The idea is all.

A 22 year old literature graduate and an occasional scribbler, Momina Masood is a self-proclaimed bubble-burster by avocation and a teacher by aspiration, still struggling to make her name in the academia. She is from Sialkot, a small city in northeast Pakistan.