Sensibility Poem by Sadiqullah Khan

If I made you speak
My heart’s dear lament,
If you made me know
My sweat’s worth,
My rocking bed of tumult,
Deficient bones.

And skin cracked into hide,
My corner of lips
Bleed, instead not suck,
Taste of salt,
The river’s noise,
Is not music.
My pan a beggar’s bowl
To the mighty water,
My gain a grain of gold.
My dreams washed down
The floods.

But please, O empathy!
Return my ‘card’,
You took away with you
That I sit on the doors of apathy,
On disheveled insensitivity
On the border of your cruelty,
On the taste of your sensibility
On your stolidity, O ethereal poet.

-To the gold panner girl of Nagar, from whom I took her expired income support card and never returned.

Sadiqullah Khan
Gilgit
August 4,2015.