Naseeba Babale is the secretary of Poetic Wednesday Initiative—the leading poetry promotion organization in the north..
Poetry is a heartless rascal that does not listen to reason. Before I found poetry, or was it poetry that found me, I had a normal, ordinary life. Words had no deeper meaning to me. I didn’t feel anything. I just saw or heard or smelled. Life was simple.
Then came poetry. Since then, nothing has been the same. The sun is no longer a distant ball of light in the sky. It is now beauty, hope, love, radiance, and above all, home. It is the first thing I miss when I find myself in a place where its beautiful face hardly appears. The worst is that its heat is no longer the unbearable stroke of pain, it is now the softness of a lover’s kiss. The moon is no more a white circle that appears at night. It is now serenity, it is calmness, it is the epitome of romance and love, the moon is now my lover, and its light is the love that keeps me awake at night. I sit and have conversations with it on nights when I feel lonely. How easy it is for poetry to turn one into a lunatic!
I hate poetry for how it has taught me to feel. I now feel everything. I feel the beauty in the crow of a cock at the break of dawn, or the innocent smile on a child’s face. I feel the anguish and memories in the tired limbs of the old. I feel the love shared amongst a herd of cattle. I feel the language spoken to them by their shepherd. I feel pain. The pain the earth suffers for all of our sins. I feel its tears. I feel the cries of humanity—the pain of a child dying of hunger in a country I have never visited; the pain of lost souls and wandering minds; the pain of people separated by disasters; the pain of a lost love; of a broken promise, of a shattered dream. Poetry made me a feeler.
How do I not hate poetry when it has taught me how to read? I hated books, yet here I am now, reading letters everywhere—in people’s faces, in their smiles, in their tears, letters hidden between the leaves of trees, letters resting on the petals of flowers, letters hidden in silence, in screams, in voices. I now read everything. From the pores in our skins, to the cracks of our heels, to the lines of our foreheads. I read. I read the twinkle of stars, the hush of the breeze, the stillness of nights, the bustling of the day, I read everything.
Most importantly, I hate poetry for teaching me how to love. Poetry made a lover out of me. Before poetry, I didn’t know that the gaze from my lover’s eyes could loosen my joints. I didn’t know that a single touch of his hands could melt me like candle wax. I didn’t know that my heart could beat a thousand times in a single minute. I now fall in love deeply and hopelessly. My heart is now a piece of art engraved in my lover’s name. I now understand how to long for someone that is sitting right next to you, or to crave for a voice that is speaking to you, or how to get lost in the depths of the eyes, or in the softness of a touch, or the soothing of a breath or the taste of a kiss. I now know how to remember. How to remember the sound every letter makes as it falls from his mouth, the curve his lips make when he is about to smile. I remember the light in his eyes when he stares at me, I even remember the color of his laughter and the fragrance in his words.
Lastly, I hate poetry for teaching me how to write. I no longer keep secrets. Poetry made me bare my heart out in lines and stanzas. For making me unable to contain or hold back. Poetry has made rebels out of my feelings— I now have no control over them. When they feel the need to come out, they break free from my heart and spread themselves on paper like well-arranged goods on display.
I hate poetry. . . for making me a poet.
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