Departure
–for Tammara Claire
a shadow feigned by a cat sat on the chair
wind blabbered through empty cupboards
the couch with a pit sagged like a ghost
therefore I came out to see the aftermaths
of your departure though not exactly a history
a dripping creeper reminded the sounds you
stored in rooms, but a rusty wire slogged
unpegged hangings scattered on ground
I soiled my hands retrieving a soggy towel
a shirt insanely clasping a wet fern
slippers squelched while I assembled the
furniture of love renting another place.
*****
L’appel du vide
‘It was a strange winter’–
three trees spooked simultaneously
six leaves hanged like portraits
posed for gallows revealed a skeleton
which was obviously nude, and down
on the soggy turf rabbits skinned
over lumps of soil not far-off
from this landscape of beings
an old woman rummaged the litter
selecting a cardboard with big words
now sputtered just when a car passed
ghostly black blinds down the faces
pretended to find an address:
(a snow-white man on a bench)
his letter crept over the page’s edge
for a beloved behind the fence
of a factory where evening laid
its contents on long roads.
Rizwan Akhtar’s debut collection of Poems Lahore, I Am Coming (2017) is published by Punjab University Press. He has published poems in well-established poetry magazines of the UK, US, India, Canada, and New Zealand. He was a part of the workshop on poetry with Derek Walcott at the University of Essex in 2010.