You could have let me keep him, this love of mine.We were so close to forever, you too could have been mine:
like a dried leaf in an old book, an ancestral home, an unheeded warningYou have my history behind a border, can nothing be truly mine?
Not even the future, in a gesture of remembrance?Not even a boy I drunk like a river, made him mine
traced his veins to their roots; separation’s geographyand redrawn maps - I didn’t stop to see the land mines.
And now the dawn aches and the land grieveshis body - bent in prayer, never to be mine.
And you, a birthplace I have never seen. You linger,a wound deeper than skin. The past, just a door in my mind -
I want to walk through. Lahore. My city named a gate after you.I could have reached you - if you wanted. If you had left me mine.