Twists In A Thread Poem by Sofiul Azam

1.

Things a long way off like light-years are out of focus.
The longest way home pans out for me quite well
like mica signaling paths under the full moon,
drops of sweat in moonlight helping me like stars.

I'm going home, a character in a Victorian novel,
long breathing in, slowed by shrubberies, dead thirsty,
twisted round fears - baffling like red tides in the Yangtze
and gluey like a creeper's roots clinging to a twig.

Now wear a seat belt for a gear change and a U-turn.
You never know how things happen nor when
changes come as cops uninvited to a late-night party.
Yes, I'm a homing pigeon to the nest of a poem

built years back on the flyleaf of a 1960s hardback
dog-eared and brittle but smooth on my fingertips.

2.

Honey, I'm not simply driving back to those lines.
I know you leave for good what you left with a shrug.
I can't, I'm like this planet rounding the sun
to bring light to make you pine for it in the dark.

Well, I'm thinking of how a sandy islet in the Padma
- though full of groundnuts planted there in neat rows -
creeps into this one to get straightened out like these lines,
like hot iron beaten out with a hammer's blows.

My mind's hammering out an idea, weird perhaps:
we ferry back and forth between the old and the new,
are twists in time's unbroken thread stretched to eternity -
a good idea of the acts of twisting and being twisted.

So, let's twine round each other for…I don't know,
but where's the thread you ever imagine untwisted?


from SAFE UNDER WATER (2014)