Naima Rashid is an author, poet and literary translator. Her published works include three works of translation and a poetry collection, Sum of Worlds, forthcoming with Yoda Press later this year. Her translation of works by Perveen Shakir and Ali Akbar Natiq was critically acclaimed. Her works and views have been widely published online and in print, including in Asymptote, Poetry Birmingham, Lunate, Wild Court, The Scores, The Aleph Review and Lucy Writers’ Platform.

She was longlisted for the National Poetry Competition 2019. Her fiction was included in Best Small Fictions 2022 (Sonder Press, 2022). She is a member of the UK-based translation collective, Shadow Heroes, which teaches young people to embrace all sides of their heritage through translation workshops across different languages.

1. Weave

Like a broker of brocades,
a sea of cloth around her,
it was always like this that I found her,
rosary still in hand,
prayer still on lips.
She was a devotee simply continuing
an act of worship.
I came to her temple
like a heathen at a wrong address,
with a kind of dread
and a kind of awe.

She would ease into it gently,
begin unfurling the mounds of memories.
The tea-towels were her wedding gift from an uncle
who wore the tallest turban in the village,
who walked on foot in his polished black shoes
all the miles to the village
where he had fallen in love with a married woman,
whom he ultimately made his bride.
You could find them no more,
these khais from Faisalabad,
her nieces had hand-woven them on a spindle;
they had a rare weave.
The nieces don’t talk to her anymore because of a family feud;
these are all she has of them.

I couldn’t trawl that mine of memories
across the mountains I have to trek,
and the oceans I have to sail;
the sum of my life
fits snugly in a North Face bag.

These pieces were not other from her;
her soul was grafted on to them;
the way she would caress the cotton,
slide her hands over the silk,
touch the tassels of a gifted prayer rug,
she was honouring the souls of the gifters,
catching the breath of the parted ones,
touching up in her mind
the homes of those to come.

And all this while I’m thinking
Isn’t she planting a garden of pressed flowers,
plucked from between the pages of time?
Why isn’t she more interested in buds?

A macramé that was the only adornment
she could afford in their first house
which they rented at ten rupees a month,
a wedding dress with hair-like golden thread
at the helm – the only object she carried
when they fled Ludhiana for Lahore,
embroidered platitudes she sold
to make ends meet.

The fabric was fraught with her fight,
it held the stories she knew would never
make it into history books.

Her legacy was sprawled around her,
the question trembled in her eyes.
I couldn’t bring myself to look up,
lest she read
I am no worthy caretaker
of this sea of yards and yarns.
My style is cross-body;
I live hands-free.

2. Window-faced

He comes home one day,
window-faced,
my six-year-old,
joyous at his first ever fallen tooth,
the neat square of absence sitting on his face
like a single window
in a house from a freak fairy tale
un self-conscious
of its numerical oddness.
It lets in the wind all unevenly
and his tongue slips into the gap
all too often
slurring his speech
spilling the sounds all over,
a gush of hisses and whistles
slipping like miniscule pearls
through the perfect square drain.

3. Resident ghost

Over time
the gold leaf will wither
but the imprint of letters burnt in the spine
will stay —
one half of a writer’s life,
the realm of forever.

It’s with humans as it is with books;
a single column holds the frame in place.

Have you ever tried to erase a father?
Look through him like a ghost,
pretend he wasn’t there?
It’s impossible to do, he grows back.
Cut him off, and you’ll see it’s your own limb you lost.

You are never alone
when you walk
somewhere in the back,
the ghost of a father lingers,
too proud for apology
too late for redress.

He’ll linger where you least suspect,
haunt you unawares between yourself and yourself,
a voice steadying your cursive as you write,
a remembered tremor from a reprimanding tap
(“stay a certain distance above the line”).

Back in the day, it was lost on you
the beauty of a calligrapher’s pen
and the standard of the chiseled nib (“ball points are suicide”)
you were too young to value the attention to little things
not knowing what a thing of beauty it was
to have someone look that far out for you.

He is a resident ghost; listen,
it’s his voice in your throat
as you speak to your own son
your voice steadying itself
at a timbre
firm enough to keep him from falling
gentle enough to let him fly.

4. We were two women in a room

Across the restaurant,
we were two women in a room,
our lives suddenly face-to-face.

She was feeding a second child at her breast,
singing a lukewarm wheelsonabusgoroundandround
scanning the menu furtively in-between,
Shiva with hands in a hundred places, in her mind,
the hissing rattlesnake of a to-do list,
making her eyes senseless busy,
mist-covered windows.

Baggy pants, baggy shirt;
I remember the time
I had harbored my body in the flowing folds,
I remember when that felt like the only safe place.

I know by the heartache of absence now
that absolute dependence of a body
that came from you, was bound to you –
against your breast,
lining the inside of your mind,
wedged like a tiny nuisance
between you and another
who made love each night
(or was that another life?)

I remember the vertigo,
the merciless falling through space
finding footing
between losing what you thought was a thing of beauty
and watching it become
something from a biology text book,
a vessel through which life fulfilled its purpose.

I remember the strangeness of milk flowing,
I remember the soreness of breasts to the touch.
I remember the inkwell of shame,
the silence you could howl yourself hoarse into,
doors closing with nowhere to run.

How clichéd would it be to
smile to her and say it will go by too fast.
How much he needs you now
hurts nothing like how little he will need you later.
You won’t believe me if I told you
the ease of their goodbyes will break your heart
Time will free up suddenly,
like a lake drying up in the sun,
you’ll find yourself a stupid Jack-in-the-box,
grinning,
head out of water at last,
painted and dressed with nowhere to go
late for the show,
always late for the show.

That’s probably how she saw it, look at this woman,
sitting in the middle of a café by herself like a queen,
owning her solitude and her space,
no children to put to sleep,
no duties pulling her a million ways,
what sweet freedom it would be
for a woman to be this free.

We were two women in a room
each looking at the other
thinking how much time had gone.

5. Soundtrack of a broken home

It starts as a tear,
then the chasm widens.

Silence is the infill for everything –
what hurts,
what you can’t make sense of,
what you hate,
what won’t go away.

It’s a silence
that turns everything to stone,
a silence that says
it’s too late for amends,
laden with the weight of wasted moments;
the debris of unspoken nothings that were
meant to sweeten the everyday
suddenly standing like a dam of concrete,
the swell of the unsaid
pounding at the gates.
Tiny slips added up, each little nothing
grown into its full charge of rage.

Time keeps score,
and the body keeps score.

A perfume from a pilgrimage
becomes a sculpture
through neglect,
lying in the same spot unnoticed,
immortalizing the clumsiness of the giver,
and the refusal of the taker,
frozen in abstraction at that tilted angle
on the drawing room table
where everyone would see it
several times a day
but say nothing and ask nothing.