The lingual life of a New Year
many times, this morning I absorbed
the fricative glottal as h in the happy
hit me with the strength of a history;
Mesopotamians up to Roman sought
a contradictory blessing of Janus
the trail of passion, ingraining
hiatal pretexts of rituals, our
survival is so temporal, so this
carnivalesque of the desire of living
amidst the debris of children
bombed in Syria and Gaza, headlines
for eternity bursting on lips, fireworks
over the waters of Oceania, I see on
the screen of my cell phone choked
with messages, so I scroll down
while the dog in the street
as Auden said after the bone,
the lover is dead, pulling along a
hearse a burial with a fricative glottal.
by Rizwan Akhtar
Institute of English Studies
Punjab University, Lahore
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