Hide Me, Sandcastle, from this Wave
I am in every future of this sphere
Two, ten, a thousand years from now.
Though I know it cannot be, this realm where
Through earthquake and heartbreak I vow
As I climb each hill
To endure, it is all I can conjure
When you speak to me of Earth’s end.
The avalanche is but falling salt, mere
Jest. For I have not seen snow bend
Mountains to its will
A piece of rubbish floating down the street
Stubs my illusions of the sea
Powders and spills them, so sickly yet sweet,
To be healed again by Fancy
Who gladdens hearts still;
So I add one fistful of sand, each time
You speak of this, to the fortress
I build to get me past your doomsday chime,
And hear nothing of it, unless
It springs for the kill
Malware
I want to slyly install my sadness
Into your brain, like malware. Load it
And explode it.
How many words do I need to tell you,
How many I’m fines of gladness,
That I am through?
When you winced away from the sliced egg
Its stodgy whites and crumbling yolks,
Diced up cloaks
For the first truth and the last, I did beg
For silence. For indifference
For that immense
Boon, that thread-thin knotting of sky and earth,
Of silent friendship, that was worth
Everything. Now
In one ‘why did you never tell me?’ born
Of fear, shame, tired self-knowledge – how
It all lies torn!
Quasimodo’s Last Walk
So think, as you now look up through the old dry
Branches of winter, of the cry
He gave for the sky’s blue suffused with yellow
That never turned green for him, though
Envy’s colours blotched the world below at will,
Pacing and drumming his finger,
Watched by his dove
Left foot – On stone, always on stone; thus by
Right foot – sheer tapping he carved signs of mirth.
A walker fell in love with an edifice
He knew his love would not suffice
To save it. He sneaked in with a pen, and stole
It for himself. Yoked to a whole
Saga of faltering footsteps, it stands still
Mourning an undead bell-ringer
And his lost love.
Left foot – here’s our bite of the cheese-tipped sky
Right foot – in the jaws of a wisp of earth.
Research Question
In the first summer after flowering,
The new-parent plants all begin to reach
Out clumsily into the soil for each
Fresh seedling, each one of their new offspring
The sun-filter of loam cannot smother
The unbeating hearts that have just begun
To find the spoons and the forks of the son
And the gentle tendrils of the daughter
So when losing battles to time and man,
Do they mourn like us? Does a sapling’s death
Turn the tree’s sap bitter, poison its breath?
Or does it go on as long as it can?
Yesternight
Looming, crackling, creaking monstrous secrets,
My berry-holder, washed by dark green waves
Only wheeled things could traverse, stood half drowned
In the clouds. To battle all the birds’ threats
To my fruit I would have leapt, but the laws
Of wobbly legs held me down. Efforts crowned
In later years with giddy triumphs fail
To dim the rage that still does not avail
My friend here. Strange how deeply time engraves
First memories, tenderly opens their jaws
To swallow up the rest of a life. Child
Running across the grass, nonchalant teen
Picking coldly at the fruit, adult wild
With joy to be wheeling out wobbly legs,
Fade in the sepia of what has been,
And memory clings on by its first pegs.
Now wheeled out again, creaking like the tree,
Like it scrawny-branched, fruitless and drooping;
I yield to wobbling legs the victory,
Settle for a sandwich in a looming
Shadow.
Hibah Shabkhez is a writer of the half-yo literary tradition, an erratic language-learning enthusiast, and a happily eccentric blogger from Lahore, Pakistan. Her work has previously appeared in Wellington Street Review, Black Bough, Nine Muses, Borrowed Solace, Ligeia, Cordite Poetry, and a number of other literary magazines. Studying life, languages and literature from a comparative perspective across linguistic and cultural boundaries holds a particular fascination for her.
