Shameful Waters, a Poem by Humirah Sultani

when you don’t know how to swim
and that someone comes to save you —
it is surprising how the fear of drowning and
the sheer terror at the thought of suffocating
overrides your conscious being
as you desperately struggle to save yourself,
apparently, even at the cost of someone else’s life.

survivor’s relief was the last poison,
ending with the sleepy drops of haram (1) elixirs and
smoky clouds of scorched leaves that ebb about you —
the sweetest flavours of nostalgia never to be tasted again.
your likeness hovers above you, defeated
forever staring back
and down into the sun-starved abyss
that anchors the mirror lakes
of your guilty, welling eyes.

these are the same immobilizing,
frenzied waves that drown your being,
overwhelming you under oceans of tiny briny droplets
of frustration and melancholy and apathy.
forever appalled by how one person treats another
with such injustice and hatred and malice,
but,
always,
the abuser was once the abused —
the flooded seek to surface,
the doomed dying to breathe once more.

tidal wave after traumatizing wave,
you welcome it like a weighted afghan (2)
bathing you in condescending tides.
it starts with a corroding embrace that pushes you,
cascading overhead and crushing you,
knocking you down,
smashing you, eyes-first into the blunt pebbles and sharp reef.
the surf’s momentum is not your shirin dost (3) and
your pool of refuge is nowhere to be found —
only the desiccated crater of a shallow puddle remains.

you were born at an interface
between behesht (4) and these shameful waters,
severely polluted by the dark wine
of your martyred kin spilling over from a common vein
split through by the knife of unlovers and evil jinni (5) alike —
forever haunting and possessing and draining you,
those ghosts cloaked in the form of a beloved.

thank her creative highness Nature,
the very first mother to nurse downed birds,
for spinning all the threads of joy in life and
weaving them into the soft folds of warm lips —
a lover’s kiss.

whose tongue
speaks a language
that only the two of you could ever share
and strokes your soul to free you
from the swirling maelstroms of jahanam (6)

rinse off your galvanizing paralysis,
your heart and mind are still at last.
finally, you may submit yourself, peacefully
while floating with your senses deprived.
enjoy the serene, calm wave
that washes over you
and steeps your sunken heart,
like tea leaves in a glass of sheer chai. (7)

we are home
among the coral petals
of our secret tulip garden
whose stems sip away at the tears
springing from those very same waters