Kwame Dawes, Mehvash Amin" />
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Alone in Babel, Arts & CultureJune 23, 2014

Round 1: Ghana-Pakistan

PREAMBLE

The waiting is nearly over. The home nation need a win to secure their place in the second round, but the West African opposition, packed with flair and attacking intent, won’t make things easy for them. Hello and welcome to another day of tenuous parallels between the football world cup and its poetry equivalent. The Missing Slate may have an international audience, but our roots are in Pakistan and it seems reasonable to suggest that Mehvash Amin has home advantage in today’s match-up.

She also has a formidable opponent in Kwame Dawes, a multi-talented actor, musician, professor, editor and critic who also ranks among the best poets of his generation. He was born in Ghana, but grew up in Jamaica and is currently Professor of English at the University of Nebraska. He is the director of Jamaica’s Calabash International Literary Festival, and his awards include a Forward Prize for Best First Collection (1994), a Pushcart Prize (2001), and an Emmy (2009). He has described himself as ‘the busiest man in literature today’, and is the author of over thirty books of poetry, prose, drama and criticism.

Mehvash Amin is currently editor-in-chief of HELLO! Pakistan, and was editor of lifestyle magazine Libas International for 11 years. Her poetry has been published in an anthology, ‘Tangerine in the Sun’, and in a number of international magazines, including Vallum and Sugar Mule. ‘Karachi’, the poem chosen to represent Pakistan in the Poetry World Cup, was among The Missing Slate’s Pushcart nominees last year.

                           

Outside the Courthouse

At dawn, the courthouse, grumpy
as looming shadows, scowls over

the town—the men move as a
body of thick coats, cotton, shirts,

worn thin pants smelling of old food,
smoke and cigarettes; stand waiting

for the truck, for the planter,
for the landowner, for the money-

bags, for the constable, for
the loiter police, for the colonel

with his special bloody unit…

~ Kwame Dawes

Read the full poem

Karachi

We must learn to quarter fear,
dice it, serve it on plates
in manageable portions.

Instead, it is etched like
a hologram against the sky,
starting out of the sockets

of buses burnt on the road,
where they root
like indestructible fungi.

The rat-a-tat of gunfire
shatters the silence into pieces
of a stone requiem…

~ Mehvash Amin

Read the full poem

 

RESULT: Pakistan won by 28 votes

Editor’s note: If, for any reason, you’re unable to vote in the poll, please leave the name of the poem/country you’d like to vote for in the comments.

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One last love letter...

April 24, 2021

It has taken us some time and patience to come to this decision. TMS would not have seen the success that it did without our readers and the tireless team that ran the magazine for the better part of eight years.

But… all good things must come to an end, especially when we look at the ever-expanding art and literary landscape in Pakistan, the country of the magazine’s birth.

We are amazed and proud of what the next generation of creators are working with, the themes they are featuring, and their inclusivity in the diversity of voices they are publishing. When TMS began, this was the world we envisioned…

Though the magazine has closed and our submissions shuttered, this website will remain open for the foreseeable future as an archive of the great work we published and the astounding collection of diverse voices we were privileged to feature.

If, however, someone is interested in picking up the baton, please email Maryam Piracha, the editor, at maryamp@themissingslate.com.

Farewell, fam! It’s been quite a ride.

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