A journal of art + literature engaging with nature, culture, the environment & ecology

Some Birds

Rizwan Akhtar, Lahore, Pakistan

 

crying in the middle of night

want an early dawn, clamor 

against the sky to vacate 

darkness from leaves, bloated

trunks, rinds of barks, shreds

of bottles thrown out like words

from cars adding to their litanies; 

loosing feathers they scuffle in

nests, negotiate the best perch

for a morning still embryonic

and saber sounds with beaks

uproot the system of silence

reserved for nights, nudge 

a language creeping on ears.

 


  

Rizwan Akhtar’s debut collection of Poems Lahore, I Am Coming (2017) is published by Punjab University Press. He has published poems in well-established poetry magazines from the UK, US, India, Canada and New Zealand. He was part of a poetry workshop with Derek Walcott at the University of Essex in 2010.

Plastics

Broken Country