Air Black
Dancing leaves fade to a city's thick, settled haze of toxic scum.
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From ULR
Issue 7 – Environment
Each arrest
From society's death knell, a fig of hope blossoms, nourished by nature's quiet, enduring promise
June 15, 2022
Each arrest
may feel
like a death knell,
every baton wielded—
the devil’s pitchfork,
I put down the paper,
look out, see a cloud,
even if this one,
may not rain,
there is water enough, still,
for a fig to grow in my yard,
discard
its dry leaves,
its fruit to ripen,
there is hope yet,
this too may pass,
as long as
the environment
holds.
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PART OF A COLLECTIONNature Overwhelms and 4 other poems
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Maaz Bin Bilal
Maaz Bin Bilal is the author of the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar-shortlisted Ghazalnama: Poems for Delhi, Belfast, and Urdu (Yoda Press, 2019), and the translator of Fikr Taunsvi’s Chhata Darya as The Sixth River (Speaking Tiger, 2019) and Mirza Ghalib’s Chiragh-e-Dair (forthcoming from Penguin, July 2022). He was a Charles Wallace Fellow in Writing and Translation in Wales (2019), and is an associate professor of literary studies at Jindal Global University.