In the dead of a night, the sky frames innocence.
A boy finds sweetness in the art of listening, listening
to the hands of music fiddling with his breath. A dance
erupts his sister’s waist, mama strokes the dispatched
corpse of a tree into fire to lure her cooking into a miracle
of sweetness. Music claims the air, a star forces itself to wink,
prayer leaks from a nearby mosque, children cross the boulder
of parents’ warnings, as they play ‘hide and seek’ across the gloom
of a moonless street, crickets nurse silence into extinction, father
shares time with a friend, everywhere becomes a moment’s paradise,
paradise existing as memories.
The morning is a latecomer,
or am I so punctual in receiving
the new day on my palm? Dawn
beacons to my memory,
its emptiness building a world in my head.
I remember the clan of happiness
thumping in my chest each morning,
my tea smelling like mother,
the fragrance of her love is like a sun
spreading its rays through the wind,
cutting through every window,
welcoming every breath into a new day, into
another fight for brea(d/th).
I taste dawn again, till I travel down to dusk
as a wreckage of everything awful.
Wafting through this city and everything tastes like blue.
The first time I whistled these bones, they bodied back
into flesh. I sought to fill my head with every gleam, every
wink of brightness dancing in a gloom, scurrying in the dark,
crafting me into anything scary. Every memory I sip carries first.
This is it: first time tasting the moon on my lover’s lips, first time
filling my gaze with a cloth-less silhouette, first time crawling through
my father’s wishes. I sip the past again sonnet times until the sky’s blue
waft into this city and into these fleshes bodying back into bones.
