Ghazal: Tangle
Rent from DeepDyve- Ghazal:Tangle
Lorelei’s mythic hair, her combing song, caused sailors to find their fate in a tangleTo make a woman, you must first wring her neck, said Picasso. Line, bait, tangle
Woman, sacrificed, is eaten whole by love gods, household gods, land and sea godsBerenice, Ptolemy’s bride, lopped o√ her braid for a god, to save her mate in a tangle
The story ends worse for most but Berenice’s sacrificial locks, prized, became starsin an iridescent cluster. On a clear night you might see that love agitate the tangle
Strange, the flame in Rabia Basri’s metaphor became Napoleon’s bomb in CairoThis Sufi’s Heaven burned when the library burned; metaphor in a state of tangle
You pour a cup of chai, Zeest, then another and another to thaw a frozen loveThat summer garden was a figment. Its floral pendants: dead weight in a tangle [End Page 23]
Shadab Zeest Hashmi’s Baker of Tarifa, a book based on the history of interfaith tolerance in Al Andalus (Muslim Spain), won the 2011 San Diego Book Award for poetry. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize multiple times, translated into Spanish and Urdu, and have appeared in Poetry International, Nimrod, The Cortland Review, RHINO, and elsewhere. She represents Pakistan on UniVerse: A United Nations of Poetry and has taught in the mfa program at San Diego State University as a writer-in-residence. She is a guest columnist for 3 Quarks Daily. Kohl and Chalk is her new book of poems.
