Six Poems by Shadab Zeest Hashimi (poetry, ’09)

A sequence of six poems by Shadab Zeest Hashmi (poetry, ‘ 09) appears in World Literature Today:

 

Qasida of the Bridge of Teacups
The soul cleaves into two somewhere along the birth canal,
didn’t you say, Plato? I send your echo back to Athens
from my rug of locked antlers in Peshawar
where I fill a teacup with the question of half my soul
(as I watercolor a whitewashed village I’ve yet to see). In
the torpor of the mango season, I am closer to the heady basil
that fishermen of the Black Sea put in their boats for luck –
Will I know my soul by the musk of tannin ink, sugarcane

. . . Continue reading this poem, and five others, here.