Search Results for: Waqas Khwaja

Posted in General Interest, interNational Poetry Month, Poems/Poetry, poetry, Poets/Writers, Writing

Whispering Vibrations | Waqas Khwaja

Posted on by The BeZine Editors

what is left

on a kite string you fly me
then cut me adrift
with your own hand
to float on air
in the passage of seasons
the flight of geese

carried by the breeze
spinning and sailing
ever further and away
keeling when it sags
to sink among trees

snagged by a runner
as spoils of conquest
claimed by strange hands
by right of possession
used willfully then
harnessed and tied
to unfamiliar strings

raised once more to fly
and ripple in the wind
its dance and the surge
could still entrance
but severed in a duel
swept away by the draft
i am seized yet again as bounty
straight out of a fickle sky

so captured and surrendered
in casual repetition
riding ever degraded strings
in the hands of fortune-hunters
my colors fast declining
my garments wearing thin
patched up for tears
dispirited now and dull
flickering but damply

spent and shabby
i fall at last
to a gaggle of street boys 
who brawl and bicker
over a patched-up thing
and tear it to pieces
in rivalry and spite

the one most irate
snaps the spine in two
cracks the bow
shreds and crumples what is left
tosses it on the roadside 
kicks dust over it
looks about for other game

all broken and torn
i am but scraps
of the paper kite I was
fooled by the fable
of a momentary release

it was just sport for you
but a worn piece of thread
still locked in a knot
you tied with your hand
binding spine and bow
to equip me to fly
remains as a relic
in the wreckage that is left

furnace of galaxies

	virtual in cyberspace
			a cypher and 
		a dot
				digital breath

waves of sound
			no flesh 
		no bones 
cyphers and dots 

		meeting 
cyphers and dots 
			across riven continents
	littered oceans

		a wilderness of black ice
phyllium forests abuzz
				stir and fuss
	of cybernetic insects 

hammer and din 
		over deserts
	of white hot sand
				over wastelands of burnt rock
  
	whispered vibrations
in virtual ears 
			cuddles
in virtual arms

		qalandar condor
wings thrashing 
			storms spectral lips
	strokes and scours

			and shreds
	with ghostly talons
			tears into phantom
		belly and entrails

			plop
		plop 
			astral stones bubble
	molten in flaming lakes	

furnace of galaxies
	fizzing endlessly
			jets of heat
		seethe singing

	galactic light 
burbling
		spilling over
			babbling in concentric ripples

	scattering 
		clumsy wares
				a cosmic potter’s wheel
churning swirls of stars

				crude
	suns and moons
			comets
and planets fired

		glazed and burnished
celestial dregs
			candescent debris of eternity
		immeasurable space

			nothing
	purgatory in perpetual dissolution
		mutation
					trance

		trans 
				cyphers and 
dots meeting
			cyphers 

	and dots 
splatter in a virtual eye	
				arsenic
		on a virtual tongue

a virtual palm
			salted for prayer
	a virtual heart
pumping plasma

			through cyber thoroughfares
 	cyphers 		dots
burning slag
		flooding galactic highways

Puck’s Glen, Scotland
Photograph ©2023 jsburl

tryst

holding back I refuse
that gift of life
toward which I have traveled
all these long years
without knowing 
where I was headed
till ready to slip away
without regret or rancor
seeking even fondly
that state of not being
existing without 
awareness of existence
without self 
or sense of self

and this forbearance
launches us
into orbits 
far from each other
where we shall not 
cross paths
in dimensions of time 
we know
yearning incomplete lost
pulled into another world
into other worlds
until the collapse of time
in the collapse of space

that instant 
which allows us
to tear through curtains
of separating life screens
crash through spun glass
of gossamer fancies
hurtling towards a tryst
that is written into our lives
certain beyond doubt
and possible only then
at the very end
when hours are dust
and dust a flash of light

we dream the impossible
long for something 
that cannot be
and what is imagined
is rendered probable

all that has ever occurred
all that is happening
all that will transpire
converge and come together 
held all at once
in this moment 
that must be ours 
an instant that unites
and so reunites us
in a transitory gleam
in the glassworks of the imaginary 
that seizes the real
and preserves it forever
in the moment
of its obliteration

©2023 Waqas Khwaja
All rights reserved

Waqas Khwaja…

…has published four collections of poetry,a literary travelogue about his experiences as a fellow of the International Writing Program, University of Iowa, and a couple of edited anthologies of Pakistani literature. He served as translation editor and contributor for Modern Poetry from Pakistan, a Pakistan Academy of Letters project supported by a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts, and is the Ellen Douglass Leyburn Professor of English at Agnes Scott College, where he teaches courses in literature and creative writing.

Find In The Bezine

Website

The 2023 (Inter)National Poetry Month BeZine Blog Bash

Pastel of European Robin perched on a small branch by Tom Higgins ©2021
Art: European Robin, pastels, ©2021 Tom Higgins

Yokai | Waqas Khwaja

for Michael Rothenberg
Will someone rescue these demented lines
from the fever and fury of their loss?

The season on fire
the moon is out a-harvesting this fall
its tuft of hair unruly on its brow.

What reckoning awaits?

The past, a wrinkle
a ridge to stumble over
and enter the urn of the hollowed self.

Amigo, are you there?

Call him Michael.
Call him Mike.
He does not hear you anymore.

Beyond the harvest moon
a black-crowned night heron
shakes its wings and prepares to fly.

Can you hear the dwellers of these marshes?
Their odes to the subterfuge that is life?
Hermano, it is you I am trying to reach.

In a blaze of blue flames
the bird is on the wing
its breath glittering gold dust.

But it is dark here.
And the moon has not yet run out of its spite.

Go in peace
for your breath is now spores of light on the wind’s back 
floating across oceans and continents
seeded in the hearts of young and old alike.

One body only you have shed 
and, bird, taken another.
Heron’s take flight
Digital landscape from photographs ©2022 Michael Dickel

©2022 Waqas Khwaja
All rights reserved

Waqas Khwaja…

…has published four collections of poetry, Hold Your Breath, No One Waits for the Train, Mariam’s Lament, and Six Geese from a Tomb at Medum, and a literary travelogue, Writers and Landscapes, about his experiences as a fellow of the International Writers Program, University of Iowa, in addition to three edited anthologies of Pakistani literature, Cactus, Mornings in the Wilderness, and Short Stories from Pakistan. He served as translation editor (and contributor) for Modern Poetry of Pakistan, a Pakistan Academy of Letters project supported by a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts, showcasing translations of poems by 44 poets from Pakistan’s national and regional languages. He guest-edited a special issue of scholarly articles on Pakistani Literature for the Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies and another, on Pakistani poetry, for Atlanta Review. Khwaja is the Ellen Douglass Leyburn Professor of English at Agnes Scott College where he teaches courses in Postcolonial literature, British Romanticism, The Gothic, Literature of Empire, Victorian novel, 19th century poetry, and Creative Writing.

Find In The Bezine

Website

Return to ToC