Buoyancy

I.

When we consider the buoyancy of a city’s heart

There is not much that will keep it afloat

Heavy with the dust of yesterday's sacrifice

My city is broken cracking, 

water in the crevices

she used to breathe from

Despite the triggers

A hollowed silence after death 

II.

Perhaps to live is to burn slowly 

To burn slowly is to listen to your own firewood cracking 

to know you have let all of your warmth bleed into a room 

watch it latch onto foreign bodies

know in the morning you will be swept aside 

And to still be okay.

III.

In the aftermath of a funeral a city loses its feathers

The fire leaves behind a shriveled land

Empty of memory

of feeling

of the sacrifice that titled her soil

With so many graves within her belly

a city becomes heavy 

she begins to sink 

As a generation leaves her behind 

she begins to uproot

and they burrow into other solis - 

Soils that hold no memory of their family’s past

Know nothing of an ancestors sacrifice

a collective memory of building a nation 

from nothing into a home

IV.

I have heard

when you let someone inside of you, 

and then ask them to leave

Separation becomes an undoing of something holy.

V.

In the aftermath of this unholy 

We reconsider the buoyancy of a city’s heart.

There she finds between her and her lover

there is nothing more than echo

And yet, do not mistake an echo for  imitation,

a mocking noise; 

darling, she will say

The act of forgetting is an expression more violent than noise

Do not barter me for something less than memory.

VI.

There were nights without silence:

The bazaars before Eid,

the hum of women haggling

cars groaning under the weight of families

indulging in samosas, the oil crackling

My dadi would take me to get henna on my hands

I would return with bangles that jingled all day

and left glitter all over my clothes -

everything sparkled

Except in February,

when my city is only dust and kites 

VII.

Navigating through her streets from Model Town into Anarkali

the road ends at Badshahi Mosque,

Lit up beneath the haze of a city’s breath 

when gasping for air

Royal, from the time of the Mughals

and so holy, as holy can be -

Cuckoos Rooftop Restaurant one side,

Quarters of the waking red light district on the other

This city, its people: the most vibrant hues

born of this soil

holding onto its convoluted history -

its memory,

warm as my father’s embrace

tender as my mother’s eyes

A people who learnt to breathe through dust

and fly kites on rooftops

Remembering still,

how beautiful a city looks

despite