Category: POETRY & PROSE
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the victims will not be there to judge
they won’t judge the lives we’ll lead/ not the memorials/ not the protests/ they won’t judge the history told in their honor/ the mourning of their loss/ the fights we fight like hell/ the boycotts/ they won’t judge who crossed the picket lines/ the people coming together/ the politicians who…
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Restore Songs of Palestine
losing someone you know losing family members you wanted to know but never had a chance to What life wisdom would you have wanted to share? we’re moved by a hunger to learn more about the untold loved ones know our survival depends on Things passed down I dream…
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Unsent Love Letters
This morning, I wrote you another letter. (All the things that should’ve been said) Though I told myself I wouldn’t, racing thoughts fill my head. Perhaps, I should just go back to bed. (All the things that should’ve been said) And forever you are my addressee, for who else…
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A Lost Button
Off a cotton shirt, the shiny, lone button popped, stray threads frayed in place, reaching around the vacant space with wispy arms and fingers, palms lost and blending on fabric. Soulful bonds, whorled and weft from dyed thread, from soulless creatures of fabric, tied by their shared brotherhood—the taut, red…
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To Fill a Paper
My teenage years often feel some sort of sick competition, as I watch college applications and academic success swallow so many students like myself. Though it may not actually be the case, the feeling of having your future determined by the actions you make as a seventeen-year-old is terrifying. In…
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Night of Power
“The Night of Glory is better than a thousand months…it is peace until the break of dawn.” —The Holy Quran, 97:3-5 . . . Thick, feverish air swells in soft billows, falling like gossamer over soundless trees, a whisper lost between the minutiae of trembling grass shards. Their…
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The Partition
The Partition is known to be the world’s largest mass migration, displacing 14 million people and killing another million. Following the British Raj’s withdrawal from undivided India in August 1947, the Radcliffe Line was drawn between the newly independent nations of India and Pakistan. The task of demarcating the boundary…
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Grief in August
And so I write to my Rabb this time… Whenever August rolls around I become numb. From the Partition to Article 370, and the martyrdom of Imam Hussain. I can’t help but cry uncontrollably. August is the month I pour my grief onto the prayer mat. I stay there for…
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November Melodies
Oh you chipped, red-rusted leaves, swinging to and fro’, beneath the yel-low— scattered, blanched, frayed You stayed a little longer this year: Knowing that hearts cannot help but long to witness the morning song of your ever-beating autumn: Just another November Melody