Kinaara

Aqsa Ghazanfar (20) is from Lahore and is currently studying Medicine, something that never fails to give her a high. If she were to describe herself in one word, she would choose “polar” and if she were to describe her poetry in one word, she would say “raw”.

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Is it really forbidden love?

We, the broken people,
Love each other because
We know exactly where the cracks are.
Our eyes
Search for the same kind of pain,
And like a puzzle’s pieces go together.
Your eyes lock mine
And your hands fit into mine.

A child called Life
Puts these pieces together,
And when it’s done
It looks down at us
Gaping at the picture it’s completed.

It’s a completed puzzle.
The edges fit perfectly.

But the edges were all that Life tried to fit together.
Trying to put the picture together was what it missed.
Love is the perfect, square boundary of this puzzle.
But the pieces within don’t make a picture.

But I ask you, my love,
Does it really have to be a perfect scenery?
What if Life created an abstract picture?

—

When words fail me…

I could write you my soul,
I could write you my heart out.
But I can’t.

This attire that holds my soul in
Sheds no words, only tears.
I pushed you too far away,
Expecting, subconsciously, that you would pull me back –
Back to yourself, into your arms.

Into your arms and away from my fear of abandonment.

Before I let you go,
I looked for you within me.
But turned away from what I saw.

I looked for you, then, in the world.

But you pulled me right back into myself.
A part of me now, I could never let you go.
In the deep hollowness of every night,
Lord knows I hold on to you.

Holding on tight to you,
I gripped you close to me,
Not knowing that I was letting you go so deep down,
And keeping you so sacredly close,
That bringing those emotions to the surface
Would be impossible.

In worldly terms,
I fail to express myself.

Like stones settled in the depths of an ocean,
You reside so deep within my soul
That I cannot find you,
Only feel you.

And just like a movement in the depth of an ocean,
Causes waves,
You move within my soul,
Only to cause waves to flow through me,
And they reach the surface,
Welling up in my eyes,
After they have shaken all that they touched inside me.
I could compare them to a drop of ink,
Thrown into a glass of water,
But I won’t
Because the ink spreads and colours the water evenly.

You spread through me,
Engulf me,
Grip me,
And then you stay within me.

The cold mask you see on my face
Is not a shield;
It represents the battle within.
It signifies the conflict
Between my racing thoughts and static intellect.

Many a times, you might think that I am letting you go.
Those are the times when words fail me.
That is when I yearn to tell you all I feel and where I stand.

But when you stay so deep within me,
How am I bring you to the surface?
It is as if a soul were to be pulled out of a body,
It is as if an ocean were to be robbed of its depth.

—