The Poetry Marathon

Al-Aqsa is in my heart
and the settlers
rip the fibres apart to
chant death threats
to my hollow chambers.
If I do not survive
to see the cerulean grief
in the domes of my heart
morph into the liberation of a country
between the river and the sea,
remind my progeny from the narratives of prophecy;
Pharoah thought he was god
but my God split the sea for the believers
and drowned the enemy
so remind the oppressors that
God is not with them.
Tell my lineage that His Justice
is all-encompassing
and that His,
is not an Abode for the hopeless.
Tell my progeny to not trust the historians
that weave baseless stories
with a golden thread
that fails to cover the blood
on their hands
but to find the poets
who have encrypted their valor
in the ink flowing in their vessels.
Tell my progeny to never lose Faith
in His Wisdom because the
wrongdoers will suffer
in an infinite time-loop
and By His Will, we will witness
the miracle of His Mercy
and the wreckage caused by His wrath.

More poetry via instagram @anjaanography

The colour of modesty is rouge.
It is the shade of the clouds as it witnesses the consummation of two skies;
The colour of your thoughts on my skin;
Blossoming roses when I sigh your remembrance to the winds;
my palms pressed in prayers for our reunion.
Modesty is the rouge veil that serves as the only partition between our souls
The colour of the stars in which we were named each other’s
and of the flickering candle in my hollow chambers that burns with your partition.

Faith, on the other hand, is an opaque cerulean.
The colour of the ocean, knowing it has the power to swallow anything whole but only ever performs catharsis;
The walls of a mosque that have been erected to protect the identity of a nation;
Faith is the cerulean in my veins that migrates to perform a pilgrimage only to pave a path to the centre of my universe:
The cerulean on the paintbrush that God left in the vase of my soul that reminds me that every time I shatter, I find Him deeper within.

More poetry via instagram @anjaanography

My heartbeat is not a metronome.
It beats erratically
threatening to turn
my ribcage into dust.
My sternum fends itself with
a sorry sword hanging off
of the end of it,
for the xiphoid process can
only pierce what is within
and I am only broken dreams.
I suppose God is trying to
exhume the
grief out of my chest.
but it bleeds into my vessels,
fills the cartridges of my metacarpals
and no matter how much I
drain this ink
it still stains the melanin with sin.
I am not a saint but the pain
within will drive me insane.

More poetry via instagram @anjaanography

Forgiveness is easy
For those who have never grieved.
Time does not heal wounds

There have been nights when the darkness was not dark enough to exhume my soul
but I prayed it away
because life was too consuming.
When the fingers of Death
pried me open to remove the oyster of my soul,
I did not feel the fear paralyze me
because I have been ready to go on
the condition that I am granted the
highest level of heaven.
Death carries me in his limp arms,
prays over my fading scars.
Hymns— that were supposed to put the dead to rest but have brought me back to life.
I suppose strife has a strange way of
wrapping itself within your genes
that even the nimble fingers
and remorseful lips of Death cannot undo.
I feel Death’s gaze peruse my skin;
trying to find the eye of the needle to
remove the thread of grief
but I will be buried with grief
as my only heirloom.

More poetry via instagram @anjaanography

My dreams are drying
on a clothesline
that’s begun to look
a lot like barbed wire.
Shrunken dreams, had they dried,
would have been ripped to shreds at the hands of time.
We are but puppets,
and according to Shakespeare,
this world is but a stage.

More poetry via Instagram @anjaanography

Green orbs stare back at me
where lily pads used to be
ask me what the sacrifice was for.
Ask, how long before the lotus
is allowed to rip through the riverbed
and reincarnate.
Ask, if the morning has passed,
if dusk has arrived.
Ask, if now the time is right.

The season for blossom has long turned into autumn but the permafrost refuses to thaw from this heart frozen in the winter of partition.

More poetry via instagram @anjaanography

What if I have no more poetry left in me.
All my grief drained in these metaphors,
what if I have written all my poems
and all I have left is bare bones.
I’ve been here before
and I’ve conquered
but what if I
don’t have it in me anymore.
No—
I’ve been here before
and I’ve conquered.
My words are in a state of war
but I have sworn to sew
all my words into a throne
to testify to my hustle.
My struggle
will not be meaningless.
I am my own definition of success
because poetry is not how many eyes
peruse your verses but how many hearts you touch

More poetry via Instagram @anjaanography

Silence between us
sounds like prayers made for a reunion,
like poems written in the darkness
but you don’t return.
The time is marked
on the morse code of my muscles,
the melanin therein has been completely replaced which is to say
my skin is forgetting you
and my neurons won’t remember much longer.
There are only so many prayers
a poet can make
before they turn into pleas
wrenched from my heart
and only so many poems
a sinner can write
before the distance
becomes a metaphor for you.

More poetry via Instagram @anjaanography