Glance
Brodsky writes that in his native marshlands of Russia
A glance is accustomed to glance back- it should
been unless it was the glance of a soldier sitting
on a tank aiming either at Tiananmen Square or
Ceaușesc’ s Bucharest. Just once before stealing
gypsies also peep, and they have their republic,
scopophhoic army on fringes, same as the Dalits
with affixed sockets, watch the crops otherwise
rotting in the granaries of Brahmins. But amidst this
I also see a woman wearing goggles, whom I
cannot ogle, and the baby next slurps on her breast
eyes closed on a bench after peering at a dustbin, in
the evening when people walk past casinos where
cameras monitor replacing human stares, the war of life
is watched twenty-four hours, love housed in the
mute stares stutter but does not fall, believing is seeing.
Rizwan Akhtar is a writer from Lahore, Pakistan. His debut collection of poems, Lahore, I Am Coming (2017) was published by Punjab University Press. He has published poems in well-established poetry magazines in the UK, the US, India, Canada, and New Zealand. He was a part of the workshop on poetry with Derek Walcott at the University of Essex in 2010.
The Marbled Sigh 