For Aishah

 

If you desire measuring the depth of your patience, the threshold of your understanding, then stroll into the garden of lovers with no bulwarks raised around the garden of your soul. Over the decades, men of different skin grafts and textures had woven and adorned love in different faces & garments. Love when weighed on the scale of numerous definitions, stands just right there, head-to-head with poetry. Wrath is something forbidden in love, so men defined love as patience, as the will to keep paddling the canoe of compassion even in the pool of your own blood. You can compare love – for its strength – to an eagle, but never in the chapters of comparison against peacocks and foxes, for love is neither proud nor cunning. When the tentacles of love engulf a poet, all the imageries in his verses subtly praise the beauty of the beloved, glorify all her attributes with angelic metaphors. In his verses where his readers conjure nothing but sunflowers, unknown to them, the poet had deftly managed to wrap the fragrance of his beloved in the petals of sunflowers ensnared by the receptors of his nose while she was scurrying down the corridor & her beauty made manifest under the yellow spell of sunshine in its radiant corolla. Spoiler, this isn’t another lecture about what love is / should be / isn’t / shouldn’t be / ought to be. This is but the whisperings of a drunken poet cloaked in longing, pining with all of the nerves and fibres of his being for the night of reunion with his distant beloved.

 

 

 

 

 

Photo by Karl Taylor on Unsplash