Sheikha A.

Bermuda Triangle

Old stones broken artistically know

a useful existence by forts for men

who cowered against prophecy. For

the princess fighting boars, love is

a fairy tale in the wind. The cold sea is

gentle beyond its bed of stinging corals

for even clouds amass like soft-blown

rings when the whales call from beneath.

Early rays of pre-anticipated fervour

never meet a wet ground faithfully;

pellets reach down as seeds: hailstones

in the arms of malady. The flowers

from this union will be dark.

The Chronology of Hair

These tresses don’t snake down the slim

back of my integrity for your pleasure;

many moons of long awaited nights had

been caught into earthen bowls of water,

cooled and the ends of my hair dipped   

to grow these roots, they didn’t just spring

out of a barren scalp, they grew like cactus

in a desert of heat, they grew like roses

from a puddle of mud, they grew like palms

bedded by a rubble of ash, they grew narrow

then wide, then thinned, then receded

but its growth never stopped, cropping

on a different plateau for nascent hands

to ornament with guileless vanity

and my reflection in autumn’s luminosity   

showing me at what age I would become

young again, for the number of times

seasons would take turns in (r)evolving;

the rubbing of kohl in patches of scarcity –

willing growth – of what has gone;

of what’s to come.

Sheikha A. is from Pakistan and United Arab Emirates. Her work appears in a variety of literary venues such as Star*Line Journal, Poetry Repairs, New Mystics, Uppagus, Poetry Super Highway, and elsewhere. She has recently been published in Persian Sugar in English Tea anthology where two of her poems are translated in Farsi/Persian. More about her can be found at sheikha82.wordpress.com