I am a thief in the night
I steal away all you clutch at, sweet one, Continue reading
Author: Haneen Khalid
Little me in a big world, wandering, wondering, writing.
Midnight Musician
There was once a dirty street
Narrow and dark it dipped away
Into the distance
Winding Continue reading
A World Away: Bannu, May 2015.
Extracted from undergraduate thesis, first published in 2015.
The Margallas finally come into sight, a hazy blue presence becoming clearer and clearer with every mile of motorway. The Peshawar-Islamabad route is beautiful. There are rivers and canals and trees, cattle, and small, neat farmsteads. There are some rugged peaks too, but they are not the Margallas. The Margallas are home. Continue reading
On Choice and Being
You see, there is a most profound difference between having our choices and being our choices. When I reduce you, your being, down to the choices you made under circumstances I have not faced, feeling feelings I have not felt, I am reducing all you are and all you could be down to one label, one concept inside my own head. It is a violation. Continue reading
How do I love you?
For the Doorkeepers of the heart, that safeguard our tears in the night.
How do I love you
Softly as the snowflake
Falling in the dead of the night Continue reading
Beggar-woman
Sky curves over my flying hair
Like hallowed cathedral spires, Continue reading
My Body is a Battleground
The problem with being infinite is
I have no frontiers
You will roam as you please
I have no walls Continue reading
On Grief
I listen to the sweet lilting of a Persian poem, perched softly on my bed. It has been a long day. The sun came out in all her summer glory and then the clouds gathered and had their say. It rained a while. Then the breeze picked up, wrecking havoc with my hair and going deep into parts of me I barely remember. A day, I muse, is a metaphor for an entire life. There is a dawn and a dusk, and a span of time in between. And then there is sleep. Continue reading
The Ritual of Bread
It is a gentle summer afternoon and I have a bowl full of golden white wheat flour laid out. It has an earthy fragrance- like it never quite forgot the fields it came from and part of it yearns to go back there still. I run my fingers through its grainy texture, rubbing between thumb and forefinger and letting it slide off my palm. I feel how each grain must have exploded as the millstones ground and ground and ground, gold to white, and gold to white. And as I stand there, I wonder how many men and women and children over the millennia stood just as I am, with both hands covered in flour- just as I did. It is a ritual honed over lifetimes upon lifetimes. Continue reading
Samsara
I wandered long years amidst the clouds
On some nameless faceless dark land Continue reading
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