Ghazal for Grandmother
Grandmother holds her lips together,
Brimming riverbeds, both muddled by dust storms and darkness.
Something’s gone sour–
Milk, maybe mango
left out in the sun too long.
Her hand dances a direction,
A willow branch, silently bowed by the western winds.
I reach for her blouse,
Cool, like the kiss of pomegranate seeds
Against my budded fingertips.
I pry a ball of blue cotton from her forearm,
Fraying, yet still bound.
Speak she tells me, a command
From a voice that wanders like the waters, distant and dreamed.
I watch saffron spill across the highlands with dusk.
Khané, I whisper, a secret song against her ear.
Eyes, so brown they once traced violet,
shine with silver translucence beneath her gossamer eyelids.
Her crown, once rich and dark as the soot birthed by fire,
Has now faded gray, and through it
She cannot hear me.
She slips back to Grandfather, maman, khâhar.
Mist pulls at us both.
It latches around her waist, roams her eyes,
Glazed gray with age, and slippery with sorrow.
Desert words break against desolate ears as
The children slip down Grandmother’s cheeks.
Summer sends sweet sumac,
To nest in her womb.
All the while,
Wondering when it will sharpen,
And snap in the fall.
Life seasons the August winds,
Wind chimes twirling to magpie melodies–
But something smolders nearby–
Our heritage, our language, left out in the sun too long.
The demise of delicate vowels,
Twisted tongues and cursed chords
That judder ill-fated phrases, with rumbling resonance,
With diamond defiance.
It all dies suddenly, as the snap of sharp white jaws
Ignite what was once cherished
In the grate of titanium teeth.
Hands, ashen and
Impervious to our blaze,
Ring the memory, the melody
From our bronzed necks.
Grandmother encountered them years ago when she was young,
Her face sleek and smooth with rosewatered youth,
Limbs slim and strong, the strength of our honeyed songs slipping through her hands.
Now she clutches my wrists
In quiet desperation,
Fingers sticky with words that escape us.
Keya Mehta is a high school student whose work has been published in Cathartic Youth Literary Magazine, Teen Ink, and The New York Times. She is the two-time winner of the 2023 and 2024 Storm King School Poetry Festivals, the First Place Winner of Roanoke College's 2024 High School Fiction and Poetry Contest, and a 2024 Scholastic Art and Writing Awards Gold Key recipient. She is also the founder of The Rumi Review, a literary magazine dedicated to amplifying the voices of writers of Middle Eastern descent.