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Three New Poems by Rizwan Akhtar

Ghazal: in the Rain

for Ellen Mansfield

What drove you to get yourself wet in the rain
Perhaps a project long pending, only in the rain

See your body curving & splashing for targets
Not me but those slanting arrows in the rain

Oh! like a strain the dress stuck to your flesh
limbs expressed pain of embracing in the rain

eyes failed to see the inner secrets of body
This ghazal too covered something in the rain

Who knows the muse disguised in those drops
Your chain of hairs funneled water in the rain

the squall uprooted you looking for a support
the heart leapt just to touch you in the rain

a plain rain sent noise from the black skies,
what kept me silent is your dance in the rain

Alone you soaked gesturing at some absence
Next time call the poet to drain you in the rain!

Domesticating Muse

I want you to leave the skillet stewing
and listen to the poem I am holding

you may bring yours after you finish
squashing sheets and steaming shirts

our pact need to be revised off and on
ironing words too is a domesticity,

to go lyrical with impulsive kisses
inside kitchen or a serenade on taps,

not crammed with ingredients your
recipe; knead fingers, mope hands

over a rattling kettle and a toaster
rinse cups and towel their dampness

by the time the taste eludes palettes
embracing in front of a burning hob.

Stopping By Keats’ House

for Tammara Claire

On a wind-wobbling day Inside Keats House

when clouds clamoured on a mere grey sky

I sat on a bench wrecked by English rains

gazing on the metallic gravel leading to

a black Mulberry roving in front of the

kitchen garden, and an outhouse claiming

silence— the poet penned sitting under

the plum tree— unatoned a sad face

far away from the Grove waits enduring

a swirling heat checking out messages—

I am on hiatus reading odes hoping that

on his way home every poet finds a muse.

Rizwan Akhtar – December, 2019

Rizwan Akhtar lives in Lahore, Pakistan. His debut collection of Poems Lahore, I Am Coming (2017) was published by Punjab University Press,Lahore.  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. Rizwan also holds a PhD in postcolonial literature from the University of Essex, UK, and is currently working as an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan.

More poems by Rizwan Akhtar from ‘Lahore, I am coming’

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