Poems by Rizwan Akhtar
By Rizwan Akhtar
after reading a poem by Dylan Thomas
I fell in love, and with his habit of visiting
caves with cobwebs; I retire in a room,
visit me when there is no compulsion
and the window is slightly open to let
eyes earn the sight of an embrace,
the music lips slurp, muffled by a howl
“How are you?” living in the foliage
where a squirrel hid far longer, unmoved
for a moment, morphed into nibling
rodents tearing their colony of love.
“The Rain Wrote a
Story”
By Rizwan Akhtar
the rain, wind, and the waltzing trees
created waves like sentences, wet birds
shrugged their feathery coats, after
braving this weather are now sedentary,
electricity poles stood alone at a crafted
distance like lovers forced to stay away
their metallic isolation, around which a web
of cables jetted a society of beeping routers,
so that we could exchange text messages
small puddles and streams, like footnotes
were ignored in this story, rain made for us.
- 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.