Let’s Run, Faramarz
A feminist love poem in defiance of televised bigoted accusations of ‘savagery’
Let’s run, Faramarz, let’s run.
To the wilderness, let’s run.
I’ll be your huntress and you’ll be my Sun.
To the wilderness, let’s run.
Like savages true,
Faramarz, me and you.
Chasing and pouncing,
Grunting and moaning.
I below you and below me grass,
You on top of me and above you stars.
Behind us a rock and behind it a beast,
Letting us love before its feast.
Discarding our civilities, at the hands of the priest.
Keep going Faramarz, till West meets East.
Like true savages,
as they call us in the news.
But this time, unveiled
Animals for real.
I’m tired of the civilized,
And their caricature of us.
Let’s run to the wilderness, Faramarz.
Let’s run.
The Anatomy of a Flight to Delhi
I met Delhi at the back
of my school textbooks,
mostly published in
Daryaganj.
“What a mystical name!”
I wondered, reading both,
The necessary and,
unnecessary bits of information
off my books.
I never flew to North India for vacations.
And elsewhere too.
The point is,
I never flew.
A flight then was always a morsel of pulav,
that mother drew for me.
Giving each pea a familiar name.
“This is your Khalajaan … say aa”
“And here is your Uncle”
Always and always, they flew.
To the States or Mecca.
And I looked for them in the sky
“Eat quick, don‘t make them late.”
My stomach was an airport.
The spoon, an aeroplane, which scooped its passengers
I, its pilot, a hero for finishing my unfavourite meal
My mother, a theatre director.
This was the anatomy of a flight for me.
The pulav, a spoon, and an imagined organ port inside me.
Until I flew to Delhi for college —
A window seat is transformative for the first time,
but eventually turns boring.
A pilot drives you to a picnic in the clouds.
A flight attendant shouldn‘t really be this sorry.
Delhi, I loved how you swallowed me.
Was I one good, sweet pea?
Iqra Kitekar is a writer, researcher and teacher from Mumbai. She holds a B.A. (Hons.) in Philosophy from Lady Shri Ram College for Women and an M.A. in Sociology from the University of Mumbai. She began writing poems at the age of twelve; writing her first words for the sea. Her poetry has since then evolved from feminist visions of freedom and desire and an everyday Muslim consciousness. She hopes to be remembered as a poet of love in the times of absurd hatred.