Norwesters

Here I stand,
At the graveyard of saudadé.
Violins weep as the first rain heralds
The beginning of an end.

Moonlight spreads itself against the fences
Like cling wrap on stale bread:
Your letters arrive. I tear open
the envelopes to find the last song.

Dusty apologies lie untouched on my coffee table. Your smell
Tarnishing my couplets
Until they cease to make sense.

Believe me, I thought of doing the weekend cleaning
But the dust storms began,
Stacking more apologies, meaningless apologies,
Obituaries, eulogies, consolations
upon the loss of the face I used to see everyday
In my bedroom mirror.
The dust now shrouds everything I once called mine.

Sometimes I wish I'd saved enough
For a vacuum cleaner.

An Open Letter to my Favourite Poet, Agha Shahid Ali

Dear Shahid,
It's not been very long since I came across you
Between the pages
of a high school book.

Now, in the corridors of college life
I find in your letters addressed to Kashmir
the voice I had always longed to own.

Yet, on evenings like this,
I wish I could frame for you
Ghalib's couplets in Jogiya,
Marwa, or Ahir Bhairav.

Please,
Please come back
from the Ghat of the Only World
So I can build you a Brooklyn Bridge
across the valley of Saffron
with all the tears that flood my eyes
knowing you were here, and I
I never met you until
I was seventeen. And you,
You were somewhere beyond the reach
of post, or email, or video calling.

It was not my destiny to have met you.
And if I kept living this way,
I would only have this long wait
for you to tell me the secret
of the muses that refuse to strike my pen.

Please,
Please come back
So I can show you
The fireflies that I tucked away
under my pillow,
Hoping their embers would die out
With my nightmares.