Birds
for you
They scrape and bill for answers
I peck evenings for small words
finches and robins temper tones
They don’t flutter against my desires
Or rise from foggy halos
like sentences blurring intentions
only stare my doubts with little eyes
over ponds of petaled flowers
carrying conviction under feathers
a stripped choir of town’s winter
land on raven craggy earth
sank in scrimped necks
a milky whiteness of nude bodies—
clamp beaks against an urgent silence
of blue, red, and magenta quills
These birds I see cloister you
huddle like expressions
muted by long flights
They drop our histories
tied to footnotes, on vague wings.
Rizwan Akhtar works as an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Punjab University, Lahore, Pakistan. He completed his PhD in postcolonial literature from the University of Essex, UK in 2013. He has published poems in well-established poetry magazines of the UK, Wales, US, India, Canada, and New Zealand. He has also done a 5 weeks workshop on poetry with Derek Walcott at the University of Essex in 2010.