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Don't ask me to love you like that again, my love. - Faiz Ahmed Faiz
So I'm standing here at
the foot of the ocean
wondering how you can call me
by so many names.
If I sound angry, you know
I'm not the only woman on
the shore tonight. Who was it
who jumped into a fire to save her
honour from invasion? Someone local,
someone you'd own. So
me diving
into shallow water, into
the first surf of the evening
is not new.
How can you call me here,
where life is edited for the beautiful
shot, for the scrapbook entry that will hurt
sweet, and little - and not for struggle and the epic
women loving women dancing women being real history?
How can you call me where I would belong
and still lay back on the horizon
far out to sea, looking?
Am I your lighthouse, am I
everybody's, do I really mean
to shine out, my feet in the sand
and the sand goes deep
and still changes? How am I
such a beam of a prophet,
how am I not the wheel, not the cog,
not the moving parts at all?
And I would dissolve into particles
and flow into you.
*
You made the edges.
I need not navigate
beyond the terrain of choices.
I no longer know your compulsions.
Dry land is unending
and the sea is unbeginning.
Call me anywhere, I'll be
walking the line.
Call me anything, and I'll be wearing
my names on my skin
and I won't move further in
or into you.
Yesterday, I brought a band
and banged drums on the edge,
sang everyone's holiest songs
and tied ribbons into
coral and conch to see you
see me
beautiful.
You can roar on the shore today,
my love. I can hear you,
end to end, in the language
of edges. I will not leave here
now, for any flavor of home.
I am not the only woman on the shore tonight.
Kyla Pasha is a Pakistani American teaching religion and history at a university in Lahore, Pakistan. I was born and raised in Pakistan, and educated in the US. She has a BA in Creative Writing from Oberlin College. Her work, both poetry and prose, has been published on Chowk.com, the online magazine, and in the Alhamra Literary Review, a publication out of Islamabad, Pakistan. She also has a presence in the blogosphere.
