Poetry 2013, First Prize, Saima Afreen

Sin Of Semantics
Saima Afreen

Inherited by a sentence
What is it that weeps
Inside the frontier
Between
the rivers and mirrors?
Darkness s  p l   i  n  t  e  r  s  as my sun
And I   —   f   a  l  l
into a
place
That stems from you
Wounds bloom like morning prayers
Flush of glass-doors
Brush
The paisleys
of my shawl —
Broken stars are
plucked wicks
On the roof of eye…
Light pregnant with Silence
was coppice
              of dotted lines
Oil-lamps glimmer
On birth of wet letters
Cold, dark
Planets
Floating on killed papyrus
Noah’s Ark
Ferried the corpses:
Chopped words don’t always
Die in a gutter
…the gray patch is curled within
Deep wine voice
Moony blossoms
Announce the mist of past:
Archangel of waiting lines.
Thoughts-winds-feathers
Blow
As unripe harvest of commas
Cascading on
Rain curtains
That in your world
Never found a name
Between a blue and a red
Night bled
Gilgamesh
Will wake up
the next autumn
In the leaves that flew in periods…
Mahmoud Darwish
Waited too long
For Frisky Air
To build its nest
On his palms
Olive years burn
With what
Saba Arwah s…p…u…n
Questions
          loop, lament, and laugh
          inside
the white night
dying
for a black moon.
Labyrinths always have
doors in c—o—r—n—e—r—s
of lapis-lazuli.
Or perhaps visions will still
be stuck
in blue flood
seeping from footnotes