Right beside my home
lies a deep forest
Whenever I open my window,
I often catch a glimpse of a blithe baukatha
dancing and tweeting
damn caring the cuckoos’ coo coo
or the crows’ caw caw
throughout Spring or Winter
The way the dawn scrubs clear the greasy night
I used to scrub the oil-black cooking pots
And keep watching the bird
With her dawny downy arts
She used to dazzle my sight
fly fly fly from the mango to the olive
to the rose to the tamarind
Tickle sickle all the wobbly branches
My eyes raced and danced with her
My heart wobbled like a feather
Words sprinkled clear from my lips:
"O, dear, why are you so garrulous?
Can’t you stop a sec and be regally frugal?
Don't you know
That a Bau is not for katha?”
The questions dashed my eyes onto me
And excavated my bride-born identity
Whenever the bridal shower purifies you
You enter a deep social forest
Where sounds are hemmed
Expressions are stitched
Longings are measured
Baukatha, my love,
Can you tweet me
Why are things like this in women’s lives?
Why does a bride mean a deaf-mute
Like a gem-carrying frog that never opens its mouth
Should the gem be lost?
Is this for this?
Words became alien to me
In love or loneliness?
In denial or acceptance?
In loss or gain?
In blaming or shaming?
In anger or anguish?
Whenever I thought
I would speak
I would press an issue
I would raise my voice
I would say sweet nothings
I stumbled
Shy covered my joyful expressions
Shame shone my objecting dispersions
I am not losing my gem
I was not born to hurt and part
I am not to crack and break
I am not to make my world, a divide and a side:
A painful tide, a thorny ride for the greens for the buds….
Is this why I am now
A wordless actor within the hem of home?
A secluded writer whose words frogmarch?
===x===
Umme Salma, Toowong, 2025
Published by Umme Salma
A teacher, a researcher, a learner, a poet in the search for the true self.
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Salma Seclusion 