Potohar

Please welcome Kyla Pasha as our newly minted regular columnist. Her column will feature both poetry and articles, with South Asia being the focus of the latter. – The Management.

1.

The rivers are dry
and open. There are grooves
in the skin of the earth
where the wind drove weather,
once, but now only the ghosts
of cows wander – and young
drivers speed across tar with romance
in their eye for all the rivers
that ever ran this face of earth
that I’m now swallowing with my wheels.

I wish I could wash on the banks of
any one of these giants. Dip my loving
hands beneath the skin of river
to scoop out the pulp. And drink.
I wish I was so brave as to step in
and sweep away my self to a chorus
of water gods, hordes over Jordan,
swing low, sing the name
and dissolve once, and again, into froth.

2.

The sky is heavy; and this tin can
speeding on a ribbon of black tar
crushes all its passengers. No
angelic horde will speak to you now,
not until you dig your heels in dirt
and breathe again the air that came
natural to the land. No revelation
at the water’s edge, no reprieve,

not until you dig your heels in the dirt
and find the core of bone that scaffolds
the land, find the armature of dry, open
rivers and rutted hills red and bare,
salted veins and slate edges.
Not until you level
the heap of anxious
you have horded, pat down
the collected treasures
of thirty years of arching heart
and stammering knee, dug
your angers deep into the centre

and tented it all with that purple
sky of love – not until you
bare your head to the rain
not until you loose your own veins
will the rivers fill with wet and gush
and holy holy, not until you flood,
not until you flood.