After making love
we lie spooning against each other
Each curve of mine
fitting perfectly in each groove of u
Your arm under my chest
your leg flung on mine
our ankles entangle effortlessly
with a familiarity and surety
that comes from years of togetherness
For a moment, I feel
the years crawling over my skin
tracing sagas
triumphs and failures:
The firmness of youth
having left, our forms
softer and kinder to each other
We paid the toll
of this journey
with our lives and years
We paid with our beauty and innocence
We paid with our egos and selves
We paid at each step, with each breath
and now
as you lie next to me
your face snuggled against my neck
and your breathing deepens:
a soft snore, of reassurance
that is the lullaby putting me to sleep
over all these years...
I feel the richest person on earth.
Feb 24
Feb 24, 2026 at 5:18 PM UTC
I miss my mom so I try to recreate her presence with things I attribute to her: oil of Olay beauty fluid, Romance perfume, bright lipstick even if it’s the only makeup being worn, a sense of gratitude and readiness, a generous laughter, uncountable **** jokes, an appreciation of innovation and novelty, a hearty appetite for everything: life, food, knowledge, growth, and being firmly grounded in faith.
I have not found this composition of authenticity anywhere else, the perfect molecular formulation that gave shine to her eyes and confidence to her smile. And she was my mom, so I could boast and brag about any and all my achievements and she would multiply them, own them, honour them and wear them on her heart like a badge.
“Be all things that you loved about the people you’ve lost”, goes the saying. How? It’s impossible! Yet I try.
I have resorted to cutting onions freehand in circles for my salan like her, rather than the fancy crescents requiring a chopping board, (that I adopted as a statement that I was more refined and evolved than her). I used to make fun of her for tearing open her teabags as tea tasted better to her when freely floating in water. Now I’ve switched to loose tea. I readily bought amla, haritha and sikakai when I saw them in a local Indian store, though I had vehemently opposed all her attempts while growing up, to incorporate these to my hair care routine. (She had black hair at age 69 when she died. I started having grey at 27. In south Asian cultures this is a big thing). During her life, I was always rebellious to her methods. Now, I have submitted to their wisdom and simplicity.
The organic nature of life is to recycle things as they complete their turn. I cling on to my mom’s quintessence in the spirit of recycling them through me. I try to say the durood every morning as I wake up like she did, and count three good things of the day before I sleep like she did. I do everything I can as she would have liked. And I still miss her. I have even grown to love missing her, in a subterranean way , as this way she stays with me.
Today the missing has surfaced, like the supermoon of last night, causing super waves, tsunami perhaps. It will wane. With time. But love shall remain.
Arshia
31.8.23
May 16, 2025
May 16, 2025 at 3:53 PM UTC
My love, create beauty
even when everything pains
for, lo, the hardship passes
but 'your' mark on it, remains!
May 15, 2025
May 15, 2025 at 12:56 PM UTC
For my son as I tried to draw his portrait. ( Originally written in 2021. Rewritten 29.4.24)
I know each curve, each follicle
Each eyelash, every smile
I know your boastful playfulness
And your resplendent guile
I know your hiding sorrows
And the demons that you fight
I know your composition
Each sound, each smell, each sight
I understand your duty, I comprehend your woes
I know quite well your matrix,
the friends, the bends, the foes
I keepsake all your stories, I’m a bank for your dreams
I notice each infliction, rebellion, all the schemes
I Am the primal witness to the glory of your being
Perpetually enchanted, entranced with what I’m seeing
Not a flicker, not a twinkle, a spark that goes amiss
For me you are perfection, so let me tell you this
Each atom, every molecule, with my mothers heart I trace
And yet my love-rimmed fingers, just can not draw your face.
Apr 29, 2024
Apr 29, 2024 at 10:48 AM UTC
Bombs go off in Gaza,
and here on the east coast,
the friendships I have nurtured for several years
are blown away in the air like ashes…
The earth is nebulated in a nightmare
flames of despair and anger,
consume the oxygen of hope…
And now, depleted,
my heart sunk in mourning,
I am thinking of words that I will say to my son
so that he can continue to believe
in the good of people.
Arshia.
12.10.23
#middleeastconflict #war #israelpalestineconflict
Oct 12, 2023
Oct 12, 2023 at 6:10 PM UTC
—————————————
I thought I was unduly bent
with the burden on my head
No heart had ears that understood
the tales my face had said
I thought the path had sifted me
away from smoother stones
Where everything is forsaken
and no one truly owns
I thought and thought and thought some more
till I no longer; saw
For eyes, that I knew not I had
widened to stirring awe
In tumblements, I had arrived
to the hall of cynosures
where souls lit up in endurance
and patience opened doors
Accepted for defectiveness
revered for differences
Collected, all, in being dispersed,
closer for distances
Had fate and path not made me, me
and storms made waves I ride
and then I took all I held in
and looked around, outside
It brings you. where you need to be
it gives, what you require;
To then, become what you were, always
waiting, beyond desire.
©️Arshia
13.7.2020
Tokyo
For unexpected realizations, I am #thankful
Jul 20, 2020
Jul 20, 2020 at 7:19 AM UTC
احتمالی بندشوں میں جانفشانی قید ہے
کر کے دیکھیں وار تو پھر زعم ہوگا آر پار
Zeal is restrained
in the boundaries
of “what-if”s
Give it a go, so you
know, whether
your claim lives !
Couplet and translation ©️Arshia.
Apr 28, 2020
Apr 28, 2020 at 8:47 PM UTC
I’ve lost count of the weeks.
Grief has made its own calendar.
The pandemic stopped what ambition started
I surrender.
4th March 2020:
My mother has died
I can't close my eyes tonight
not because I am afraid of falling asleep
but of waking up in a tomorrow
where she does not exist.
Behold, the audacity!
I never accepted night,
and still, the sun creeps up
across the jagged Tokyo skyline
ascending the tower ladder,
bouncing off windows,
pushing apart curtains
pouring in from all crevices
as the city flips up
person by person,
onto its stuporous hustle,
as if nothing happened.
-----------------------------------------
Amazing Grace:
A million poems came to hold up my heart
as it fell apart
in my mother's death
I had prepared for this moment,
but what preparations suffice,
when air is wrenched away from breath?
I could write the saddest lines,
sadder than Neruda's
but the tales of her glory
have a more engaging story
to tell.
What would she have said
when she saw herself tagged
in her obituary?
she always counted the likes
and read the comments I receive,
rejoicing momentarily,
in what, she claimed, was borrowed fame.
And now I grieve.
My frantic efforts to capture screenshots
whenever we face-timed,
so I could hoard
her presence.
Oh, bless her essence!
even though her skin-clad bones
had lost the cushion of flesh,
even though the bruit
of the fistula in her left arm terrified me
like a constant 'low-battery' signal,
when she managed to hug me, breathlessly,
that last time,
it was an exchange
of the most amazing grace:
her pain wrapped in patience,
mine in gratitude.
-----------------------------------------
Retrospective Realizations:
And suddenly,
I remember all the condolence messages I have ever written
and retrospectively fill them
with feel, only now revealed to me.
My best compassion and empathy paled in comparison
to this reality.
Death is inevitable; mortality, inescapable.
but life,
with its enticing persistence to carry on,
is cruel.
-----------------------------------------
The poem ends but the pain doesn't:
The real mourning starts
when the visitors leave
and the phone calls end
and the messages stop pouring in,
when you have to resume living
but the dead can't un-die.
Arshia.
22.4.2020
#onewritingaweek
#weekunknown
Apr 28, 2020
Apr 28, 2020 at 10:35 AM UTC
Far enough but still so close
A pain I earned, the ache I chose
I recognise, but can’t relate
The circumstance compels this wait
As I stand by, and you become
Recalling some, forgetting some
I feel you, though not hand in hand
I know, I see, I understand!
Mindful of what lies ahead
I want to look behind instead
Or glaze past all uncertainty
And wake up when in clarity
Almond scented, jasmine hued
Chocolate smooth and zest imbued
O caress of sure hands
Full as skies, deep as lands
I may not be with you right now
But we are always synced somehow
The journey of a teardrop
From the rim to when it stops
A trace of love, on sands of time
That renders our lives sublime
Grow, engage, enhance, affect
Shine on, but also, pause, reflect
This is the space, between the two
from no longer...... to not just yet
Arshia.
27.6.19
#morningmeditation
Jun 26, 2019
Jun 26, 2019 at 11:38 PM UTC