Comfort Zones Poem by Sadiqullah Khan

Walk barefoot towards it,
Someone brought
Shoes with sharp edged corners.
‘We don’t wear shoes either’
Or its brilliance is faded on naked feet.
The human skin is the most beautiful ornament,
Don’t be consumed in human love.
That which erodes and corrodes in time
Is not the true essence, a mirror to beauty
But a glimpse of a flower in the spring
Makes the nightingale sing a song.

That a splendid moment is captured,
Beneath a flying bat at dusk
Crows on trees and falcons up high in sky.
A figured beauty walks elegantly
In this damp evening when the maple leaves
Screen rays of the setting sun.

This distance is measured
In other terms, of a magical wand
And the arm’s length
Is one century or after your disappearance.
They walk on silk carpets
And drink the light of the moon
They breathe the meadowed air after rain
And watch candle lights from
Raw glass blown in some smith’s shop.

Humans have a measuring quality
And judgments pass on ‘the wearables’
The resonance of your syllabi
And the whistling slangs slipping from your tongue.
Therefore the glitter in your eyes
May drown in the dead of whites
And amazement is a half shout, a cry
To some distant shore invisible to the eye.

There in the periphery
A war of repertoire is going on,
The girls of ‘a fascist cult’ are raising voices,
Wearing black holster coats tight on hips
Coloring their faces with colors of red
And green. You need to wear joggers
To slip through the mud of the upscaled city,
And go back to your bed,
Of an unwashed bedspread
To dream a life, next door,
Which has a distance to the next century.

The thought is in the ‘comfort zones’
They fear losing faith when a pebble
Is thrown into the serene tranquility of the pond,
Or those who have gone away on a voyage.
Tomorrow there is a paradise waiting
When the lovers walk hand in hand
And a life is begun whether hard
And the simmering difficulties are washed and sunk
In the sea on immense laughter.

Sadiqullah Khan
Islamabad
February 12,2015.