Juzar Rashida
Forgiveness
It’s time we forgive each other’s sins
Forgive the other of what it has made of us.
Forgive each other as we could forgive
Our sons and daughters who desired to live by their way,
Our brothers and sisters who always fought with us on petty things,
Our mothers and fathers who still preserved faith in us.
Forgive each other’s misdeeds that
Destroyed our respect we carried for each other.
Forgive each other’s heinous crime
Of pushing each other further into the dark,
Where an eye was quickly exchanged for an eye,
And a tooth was quickly followed by a tooth.
And we felt the fear of losing ourselves to History.
Maybe it’s time we shifted places for a while
And felt for ourselves
What it is to be living like
A Kashmiri,
Or a Pakistani,
Or an Indian.
Or a Chinese.
Maybe it’s time we took care
Of each other’s befallen egos,
Of each other’s swollen eyebrows,
Of each other’s hearts that eternally aches.
It’s time we listened
What the other had to say,
It’s time we visited
Each other’s broken houses to pay our homage.
And maybe that’s our true festival.
A natural thought
Because the natural tendency of the mind’s to merge
It’s hard for a statesman to sustain boundaries
Fear’s not something that springs forth from within
It requires a reason somewhere out to co-operate.
All that’s outside one’s being can be surveyed,
Measured and manipulated to separate a house from another
Or a society from meeting its neighbor;
There’s something I like of you to an extent that
I wish to become you and yet there’s something
Only innocence can handle or perhaps ignorance.
Yet for lovers differences are like trails in sand
Never as lines inscribed in atlases, sweating to isolate
Water from water or air from air or life from life.
What’s that thought that passes by in tenth of a second
When one sees someone suffering at a distance or nearby?
It must take an unnatural amount of work to shut oneself
From touching else’s wounds, though it be through the hands of mind
For the natural tendency of the mind’s to merge
It’s hard for a human to sustain boundaries.
Juzar is a trained and practicing architect. She considers herself as a student of languages and writes poetry in English, Urdu and Gujrati.