Poems by Rizwan Akhtar

“Autumn has a language”
             By Rizwan Akhtar

this silence has taken the shape,
for which we will search for words,
anagrams, hued inflections,
maybe a few triptychs – russet, ripe, rake.
Although mentally poking sibilants may creep in,
while I embrace you under a lurching acacia,
earlier the ground underneath was littered by a cat,
who stopped mewing after we
stopped using longer sentences,

when the wind hosted sounds
of leaves, and twigs lying on the grass,
I thought eyes would do the rest
and ears would chip in, depending
in the middle of this shower of grey tones,
bricked, cold, the verandah
a robin surrendering flight,

other expressions denoted stasis,
kept an embargo until we breached.


“The Dying Cat”
             By Rizwan Akhtar

my son named her Isabella, one
who seeks salvation, when the time
comes we need it, but it was a pussy
ticked, marbled, strayed into
our house with a papery skin,
never pregnant, maybe
a celibate type, beamed
hollowed-out, the green center
scaringly wide, a knot in
whiskers, with a cleft ear her
velvety history was fading, when
rain-heavy the paws paralyzed,
droopy belly, fur pocked like a map
of a forsaken nation, when the
dandruff drizzled, we managed
a distance, a toxic odor filled our
lives, posing still on a chair,
avoiding petting, her limped evenings
and my son’s queries, the reclusive
shadow under the car’s engine.


“We Are Tree Lovers”
             By Rizwan Akhtar

your eyes grow on me like a tree sprouting leaves
instead of pupils shedding spores, making me rub

an oak-crusted face and a fen-flecked skin shining
when I stumble upon your elbows coiling like twigs

the shreds of roots from a dried stump emanate
life outside the earth where we sit making a pair

of entwined barks, limbed and accosting each other
mating over the silence broken by pine cones falling

with flowers of yellow-white stamens weaving them
arabesques for our rites, shying you heed my arm

one branch of our dark rhizome springs underneath
the burrows full of sediments, layers of soiled love

serving over the ground on these heat-wrecking zones
of the world where balding scalps sweat and scorch

we hold on to a bower behind a woodland where
birds escape from the chortling smoke of the metro

monstering over the city smothering the rustling hours
of birches chopped and fallen like a primitive clan

we hug each other under a sequestered foliage
wipe tears as they say lovers live inside silent trees.

- Rizwan Akhtar is a writer from Lahore, Pakistan. His debut collection of Poems Lahore, I Am Coming (2017) was published by Punjab University Press. He has published poems in well-established poetry magazines in the UK, the US, India, Canada, and New Zealand. He was a part of the workshop on poetry with Derek Walcott at the University of Essex in 2010.