Anagnorisis

By Fathima Zayaan

How are you?

Do you find yourself putrefying at dawn

Or do you like the surging mountains?

Are your prayers unkempt, unwise, unanswered?

Do you like the kneeling?

Do your hands smell of clots of rusted blood

Or are they like a woodworking shop, holy and unforgiving?

Has your skin been drying, flaking and ignorant?

Is your indolence catching up?

Will you travel to your childhood home?

Someday you may need to visit the aching walls.

Do the fruits swell mighty ripe on trees, leaving you breathless and angry?

Is your heart alight with envy?

Do you still speak to your mother?

Are you still left to inexpressibly grapple with rage?

Do you find poetry in the sanctum’s cracked walls

Or do you paint over those odious memories?

Do your soliloquies forget the holy roots you’ve untangled?

All roots were once frail, and all trunks will truncate in the end.

Is your body holding up with all these shackles?

Are you tired?

Are you still searching for answers

or do you find yourself content under the pergola

of questions, questions, and even more questions?

The mind looks for patterns everywhere.

I pray yours look for the holy ones.

By Fathima Zayaan