pointillism | “chappan churi”
“Sophia Naz traces the birthing and dying of languages, their continual borrowings, the sameness in their myriad differences.”
date palms
When the clock struck
your outstretched palm at six
day was the color of a clay-skinned takhti,
night, a dark crackpot
Girlhood stopped at the stroke of eleven
day was a white hot moon
night, a blood red scene
For sixteen the digits had no time
left you to do all
the talking with your sticky fingers
On the life line of that other shore
your mother tongue became
a threadbare heirloom
weaving to and fro, in traffic
how aptly, its catch all, kal, sums up
your middle age, where
yesterday and tomorrow
have the same name
Day is the color of half
and half, a cloudy presence
hides your past
Drink it down, stare at the grounds
Night is the taste of lost earth.
“Naz’s poetry abounds in figures of speech that categories from European rhetoric scarcely cover but which are better covered by ones from the Persian-Urdu ghazal tradition to which Naz, by the very choice of this pen name as by other poetic choices, bears an explicit affinity.”
