Two poems by Rizwan Akhtar

Behind Birds are Poems

How birds choose to break the silence

dropping from leaves of trees themselves

so alone like unfinished sentences trapped

in the stasis of a fantasy unable to make its

way and just chirp to themselves which

in the case of others is insanity certainly

a theme that keeps them going unafraid

smarting from fogs rains and storms so

not being born with words is also a poem.

Library

evening flips its course

silence like an editor

siphons sounds living

inside ancient scrolls

I leave elliptical kisses on

elbows they are annotations

eyes veer over a dusty cover

a long embrace on chairs

in an ornate corner where

a black telephone whirs on

on the penultimate sentence

our hands pave way for a closure

behind huge ebony cupboards full

of tomes red black golden placed

unlike us distracted by call numbers.

RIZWAN AKHTAR’s debut collection of poems Lahore, I Am Coming (2017) is published by Punjab University Press. He works as an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Punjab University, Lahore, Pakistan.