Category: Title of the poetry collection, An Emotional Bedouin

My father lives in’ Merica
And I am in the remote bushes
My married father and his wife
And my brothers with spike hair
And sisters with ponytail
In the twenty second-floor
Seeping their souls into the lovely misty cloud.

With dry eyes
I live here in the wild foliages
‘Very soon, very soon … all processing on …
She’ll leave ….’
With watery eyes, dadu gossips to all.
Young men loiter around the house
And wink at my shadow, a golden chariot to cross
The fuming white Atlantic.

My responsible beloved father lives a life
There
Leaving my mother inside the silent earth
Calls and sends dollar
With assurance, ‘Very soon … very soon.’
Years after years. 

Umme Salma published in Transnational Literature

If you bid an early adieu
A black cloud covers the sunny view
A white snow freezes the mobile carp
Sorrow gathers on the eyes’ plateau.

If you become my saree’s colour
I can let loose the wild anchal
If you become my home’s dear
I can fade away in your core

Please don’t go
Whirling a wild sorrow

I pray hard
for love for you
Every day of every year
I put holy rites on my palms
Keep begging for permanence
in Maghrib prayer

The sun goes down—the last day of the year
The black night signals the next, the new
I keep moaning, ‘Don’t go, don’t go…’
Hold me, cold me in your dusky hue.

Umme Salma, 2016, Toowong