Old Sorrows, Old Terrors

Perhaps someday the clouds will lift, the moon poured from the flagon, ripened by the sun clenched firmly in the wine bearer's hand

- Huzaifa Pandit

Silence cracks its brittle fingers, Your voice echoes yet.

In the revels of your happy city, My heart sinks faster.

-Nasir Kazmi

Besides the apple tree in the new scriptures which dictate the flooded valleys of our extinct words, droops a brittle sky which prepares the twilight for a song that concerns the strangers anointed in warm May. May is the spoiled child of all seasons. May spills ochre dusks on the apple trees and makes mellow another season in the bloody arms of yet another spring. May is a land where the rains come down ablaze—rum dark and the cry of the sparrow reaches out to the withered tulips besides the twisted lake of cordoned sirens.

We parted at the door of the rumoured mosque after the night had almost passed in dirges on the stillborn sun. Cross out the address on your palms, they cautioned: In your cry is a song that bodes ill, for your fingerprints lie dense on the trees in aubade labour. In your cry is bloom, did we wrong winter when it dreamt of the children playing with the wolf under the pomegranate tree in the courtyard of our old house sharpened against the curfewed night? I barely remember the address to that house now. And also, I have half-forgotten their supple laughter. and their rites of cruel iron: they draft the iron in the unshed bullets into spades. The spade will mend what the sudden May storms have ruined, they prophesied.

These are old sorrows, old terrors so pearled in grief ’s lonely lottery wrapped in perfumed