Reverie (Irfan, Imran And Aaliya) Poem by Dr Shamim Ali

I am a bird unmoored from Quetta's trees,
Adrift on tides that breathe through memories,
Where mountain winds still whisper through the pines,
And voices of my siblings intertwine
Four children small beneath those giants white,
The Chiltan range like guardians of night,
We were a constellation, bright and wild,
Each one of us a different kind of child.
The heart becomes a house in winter's hold,
Each room still echoing with laughter, cold
Seeping through the windows, breath like smoke,
And all the games we played, the words we spoke.
Reverie, you thief of present hours,
You garden where the almond tree still flowers
In spring, where we would climb with frozen hands,
Those snow-clad sentinels across the lands.
I sink through layers back to mountain air,
Past mornings when the frost caught in my hair,
Past huddling together, four against the freeze,
Past running wild through Quetta's ancient trees.
The mind's a sparrow with wings of silver thread,
It flies to every blanket-fort we made,
Through winters that would bury us in white,
Through summers when the mountains blazed with light.
Here in this twilight country of the soul,
I am that child again, I am the whole
Four hearts that beat as one beneath one roof,
While mountains stood eternal, distant, proof
That some things never change, though we grow old,
That some loves burn forever, fierce and bold.
My siblings' faces shimmer in the snow,
We're running, laughing, everywhere we'd go.
Oh reverie, you avalanche of years,
You bring me joy that's indivisible from tears,
I see us there so small beneath those peaks,
The Quetta cold like roses on our cheeks.
The Zarghoon mountain watches, draped in white,
We're making angels in the snow at night,
Four shadows merging into one design,
Your hands in mine, and mine in yours, entwined.
I surface gasping, salted by my grief
For time that passed too quick, a falling leaf
But dive again, a willing, drowning soul,
For in those mountains, broken things are whole.
And though I'm far from those snow-covered lands,
I still can feel my siblings' smaller hands,
Still see the peaks that cradled all our youth,
Reverie, you keeper of my truth