Poem- Gratitude

I wish I could place the warmth

of the sun in your eyes.

There, behind grey

cataract opaqueness

I would like to place

our brilliant star.

I wish I had the healing touch

so I could smooth out

your crow's feet

and tangled veins.

Tender red buds

groping for light and wind

were healed forever

with a few drops of dew.

You saved me from myself.

I would like to return

the sun to you.

Zaina Anwar 2010

Dreamscape III, 'Love Vision'

From Miro's Bleu Series

I dream of love. Yes, I have had a vision of love. I recall strong arms and nimble fingers. I remember your rippling shadow in desire's molten river. I am walking through the same forest where we wandered in another age.

The leaves have uncurled in joy. Each blade of grass is alert and quivering to the strain of my love song that is tearing apart the misty membranes of an unquiet heaven. Our nightingale is curiously peeking through the moist foliage of a fertile tree. She wants to know if my love has returned.

*

I cradle white daffodils in my arms. I talk to bees and borrow myriad seeds from the wandering wind. I salute a hazy sun. The benevolent king extends his arms in a gesture of goodwill and mutual understanding.

*

I have watched numerous trains speeding feverishly through this wilderness. Strange faces in rattling windows counting weary miles and endless cups of tea, have seen me balanced precariously against a falling sky. They must have wondered at my tenacity...they have not seen my vision of love.

I have dipped my fingers in sweet honey and consulted owls beneath the moon's watchful eye. I have collected their wisdom like a flower gathering snowy pearls of dew. I am now immune to the mundane trials of life.

*

A wandering tribe of gazelles has entered the forest. The wind carries the intoxicating scent of musk and sunlit fur. We have formed an alliance. We have studied intricate designs of the universe.

In solidarity with nymphs and nomads of old cultivating primordial desire, we stand on the cusp of a new era and sing an ancient hymn to love.

Zaina Anwar 2010

Bedouin women

source

source

Master Photographers

Arkady Shaikhet

Father and Son in a Village in the Mountains, 1929

Photographer Unknown

Red Army soldiers hide in a trench as a WWII tank drives over, c.1940s

Robert Lebeck

A frozen canal, Leningrad, 1962

Marc Riboud

Moscow, Russia, 1961

Antanas Sutkus

Village Street, Lithuania, 1969

Pentti Sammallahti

Man on Snowy Road, Solovki, White Sea, Russia, 1992

Andre Kertesz

Accordionist, Esztergom, Hungary, October 21, 1916

All images courtesy of Nostalgiya

Poem- Mirage

Arab Woman by Nasrollah Kasraian

Higher and higher it echoes

his voice against giant

rock formations

in an Arab desert.

A bit of jest,

a playful touch

to a long journey

through a lonely stretch

of earth

since the flask is full of water...

On and on they go

on camels lovingly adorned

with ornate rugs, such

a splash of brilliant colors

and tiny gleaming mirrors

in the harsh light

of a desert sun.

Where is the oasis?

-There, just beyond the horizon...

But where is the horizon?

-The horizon is a mirage.

His heart is beating

to hallucinations.

Energy is slowly

flowing out of him

into the hot sand,

hot like burning embers,

burning in the sun's

eternal fire.

In his mind's eye

he sees vast rivers

and waterfalls.

In his dreams,

the earth is green

and fertile.

But the water

is slowly

running out

the flask is now almost empty...

His throat

is dry and parched,

like old paper.

So where is the oasis?

he asks, over

and over again,

and why is the horizon

still a mirage?

Zaina Anwar 2010

(The poem doesn't have much to do with the photograph. The only relation highlighted here is the theme of the desert to which this woman also belongs and where everything is ultimately, a mirage. It also appeals to me since I myself was born and raised in the city of Riyadh, in the midst of the fiery Arabian Desert)

Poem- Metal Mouth

Egon Schiele, 'Agony'

There is a sour taste in my mouth,

the vile taste of metal in my mouth.

Is it a symptom of bitterness

or have I swallowed rusted pipes?

Bad dreams and indigestion

go hand in hand, said Freud.

Last night, I saw a face with rotting flesh

melting off bones and a mouth

gaping wide to engulf me-

a subterranean nightmare of decay

and putrefying breaths.

There is no light in such places,

just a heart rending isolation,

and a slow consumption of being.

What is Time anyway? Is a moment

in dream more lucid than sequence?

And I wake up screaming, always

with a subconscious aftertaste

of metal or the acid juice

of bitter lime in my mouth.

Zaina Anwar 2010

Black henna..

Photo by Celalettin Tunc from Izmir, Turkey.

Poem- Dreamscape II, 'When I Met the Wanderers'

Georgio de Chirico, 'Comedy and Tragedy'

When you ask them their names, they shrug their shoulders and howl. The moon cowers in fear among constellations. The desert wind is harsh, they say. It does not sustain life. The sun colludes with the elements and destroys. Water is scarce and refuses to flow.

They have never seen a flower. What about their dreams, I wonder. Do they dream of nothing but water? There must be a clock hovering somewhere, recording time in reverse.

They scratch their bodies and unplug orifices choked with sand. Sometimes, they gouge eyes. The wind does not know surrender. The wind does not relent. It has been shifting sand and skin, since the beginning of time.

They took me to their caves steeped in darkness and arid death. They revealed a moon landscape, desiccated and infested with rabid worms, uncurling menacing hooks that attach themselves to flesh and feed on sluggish veins.

They have no stories. They have been deserted by memories. They have carved themselves into the earth.

They swallow broken teeth and rock themselves to fitful sleep, while the sun- unforgiving as ever- blazes on...

Zaina Anwar 2010

Poem- Dreamscape I, 'Negation'

Georgio de Chirico, 'The Soothsayer's Recompense'

Shelves of concrete cluttered

with exoskeleton remains

of mystic ants and endless columns

of steel tarnished with acid rain-

these are the landmarks

in one of my many

dreamscapes.

One door leads to the next,

from thought to thought I flit

with tiny wings as a butterfly,

mournful as I see how the world has aged.

On a hot evening we walked

hand in sweaty hand to the sea,

where waves rose like greedy spectres

to devour land's freedom

with the will to ceaseless negation.

The moon is not bruised enough to hear

the lament of those that haunt the earth

with their grief bundled up in a knob

of flesh we call the heart-

the pulsing crux

of life as we live it.

The dream never ends.

It always picks up

from where it left off, leaving tiny crumbs

for me to nibble when I wake to the sun;

when I wake to a new interpretation

of night's heady winds.

Zaina Anwar 2010

Poem- Echoes of An Evening

Pink sequins and an emerald wrist

in a mirror marred by violence.

Look behind you, there is a spider clinging

to a flimsy web that cannot be held

together by mere words alone.

In a green silk blouse shimmering

like sunshine on a crystal tear,

you look for distraction in a mirror;

you stroke old wounds with fingers

yellowed by cheap cigarettes and years

of bitter acceptance.

Through evenings smelling of stale smoke

and plants dying in Moroccan terracotta,

you comb your hair in a window lit

by moonbeams frail and tarnished with time.

You sleep to the lonely sound of chimes,

and engulf yourself in the folds

of a long and scathing solitude.

Zaina Anwar 2010

Poetic Passages- Nostalgia

A white dawn and the clash of aluminium pans while a rooster crows. She has risen, the last pleat of her sari has fallen into place, she stands to face another hot, summer morning. Children with tender knees buckling, under the weight of bulky backpacks, howl their way to school as mothers breathe a sigh of relief- they are rid of niggling demands for the rest of the day.

Slowly, the world comes to life. Leaves uncurl and petals shrug off night's glistening dew. The sun blushes its way out of oblivion through scattered wisps of cloud. On the terrace, she calls out to the birds in mystic code, scattering fistfuls of seed and watering her plants in wet terracotta pots. Again she scolds the milkman over his product diluted with water while he stands, grinning and cursing at the same time, his sorry fate. She collects the day's newspaper and puts out the trash for the sweeper.

At last, she comes to rest with a hot cup of tea, hunched alone, with a spine deformed with age, over a table tottering on weak legs. Inky headlines in the paper begin to blur and gradually lose all definition as she rocks again her cradle of precious memories. Once again, she hears the voices of her children playing, quibbling, falling over each other. Her daughter is in tears because her brother has yanked her braid. Her youngest, a boy of five with an incredible store of willful energy is screaming for a missing shoe or a book tossed carelessly under the bed the night before. She sees herself as she must have been then- lithe, agile and full of life.

Presently, her husband's voice, frail and trembling in an echo reaches across, as if through a long, dark tunnel to shatter her dream. He is asking for the newspaper; she has forgotten his tea. He is irritated and restless. She swivels her chair around. She is ready to spring when suddenly, a wave of terror ripples across her face. She drops her cup. It explodes into tiny china fragments.

She covers her eyes.

She falls off the chair in tears.

Every muscle and every bone in her body aches with nostalgia as reality sinks in, for she has just realized that the flat is empty. She remembers now that her husband has been dead and gone for ten long years.

She screams.

Zaina Anwar 2010

Poem- Gaza

A white lily

beneath an orange peel,

is crushed to tears when a drunken boot

slips and falls

into a gutter

which will overflow

tomorrow, when it rains.

Tomorrow, the sun will not object

as the wind steals the lily's dreams

of sunshine and wild blossom,

and carries them to the river-

in the heart of the dead city-

where no seed and no flower

has ever been allowed

to bloom.

Zaina Anwar 2010