silence plucked peace from the night
like a tennis ball thud, a measured wind
played a belated volley on jaded turf.
a century ago, father told me there was
an old man who had the habit of telling
stories to trees and shrubs (ran a rosary),
but why should he converse with trees
as a child? the question chased me like
an apparition disguised in language;
wrinkled plosives emitted from Dad’s lips
masticated details, we cuddled vacant
when the old oak made noises, we faked
the man talking to us. what if he had left
behind his army of dwarfs flecking trunks,
poetically bearable, we added—warm quilts,
only the yellow bulb flickered, an excuse
of prowess pretending to sleep.
Rizwan Akhtar is a writer from Lahore, Pakistan. His debut collection of Poems Lahore, I Am Coming (2017) is published by Punjab University Press. He has published poems in well-established poetry magazines in the UK, the 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.
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