Artwork by Sara Sultan
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.
Come now, instead of
allegorising fear,
dare we spell it out?
Dare we name the man
who left his house
never thinking: tonight it’s I,
till the bullets made him
spin and dance? And dare we
name the woman
who will not know
the mess haemorrhaging
into the sewer as her husband?
A yellow moon comes up
and the smell of fish
from the phosphorescent sea
almost cancels out
the smell of fear
and singed hopes.
Almost. For nothing can atone
but the seamless reparation
of fairy tale endings.
~ Mehvash Amin
Mehvash Amin was editor of Libas International, a lifestyle magazine based in Pakistan, for 11 years, and is currently Editor-in-Chief of HELLO! Pakistan. She has written both prose and poetry; her poetry has been published in an anthology, Tangerine in the Sun, as well as other publications, most recently in the Canadian journal Vallum, New International Poetics, Poets from Pakistan (9:1, Winter 2012), and Sugar Mule, a literary magazine. She is currently working on a novel.
