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Poetry by Hafsah Bashir

Hafsah Bashir – Author, Poet and Social Counsellor

Rain in NewYork 

It rains in NewYork 

and all I crave is the

scent of soil

I hold the dirt and

smell fruit and fortune

rich and fertile it is

corporeal in texture

earthly in odor

doesn’t smell like soil

ships me aback to the dirt,

I lived in 

I loved in 

grew my roots in

bloomed my natality in 

mere water and sheer light,

simmered the yeast,

my consciousness raises from,

fruits of my age spring from

the dirt I revere as soil

my soil, magnanimous as mother

watered with the blood of the lessers

sunned by the best of brilliance

and bearing the fruits for the Entitled

NewYork

O’ city of Form and Fortune

You are rich and reverent

Bounty blesses you

Opulence oozes in you, 

Chance reigns you,

Reward rules you

But, O’ city of affluence

Your ambiance reminds me of,

My folks back home,

The ones at margins,

Personifications of Strife

Envisaging nothing but,

Affliction and Agony

Lineage of suffering they are,

With vessels channeling misery,

And Blood as volatile as joy

Life evaporates there,

As rain drop in the the desert

Dread precipitates there as, 

Death sleeps in the bed of life

Their sun is shaded with despair

Their moon is shadowed by fear

Their night is elongated by doubt

O’ the countenance of grandeur

Your texture is deluxe,

Your majesty is radiant,

Your spell is seductive,

But my complacence stings me,  

And all I envision, is,

The Visage adorned with Peril

Hasfah Rizwan, January, 2021

(Hafsah Bashir is a Writer, Poet and Home maker from Pakistan. She lives in NewYork and has published her major work in comparative literatures such as ‘Peace and Politics; a Polemical Reflection’. She is an audible female diaspora voice with subjective and collective experiences in her work.)

(Image attribution:Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons)

This section: Poetry, stories and poems