A Poem by Shereen Akhtar

For The Nurse Who Woke Me

There’s a difference between a nadi and a dharya he insists,
though the ocean rock bottom with its cuddling prawns and
its duller corals pocketing their passports and travelling side
to side — like I did once on that bus through Bosnia, radio
crackling but below, vineyards — might think differently, or
perhaps it simply doesn’t care about the language we choose
to demarcate a river from a tributary; or demarcate a country
along the twenty-second parallel, the piece of unclaimed land
that donates itself to floods here and there, inundations now
and then, close to the point where the miraculous walls of
water lifted up for a people oppressed; a strange heaven that
lasts for a couple of moments, letting us all in again and we
remember, all of us, the radio crackles beyond the centuries,
that some of us can cheat death, lying in intensive care units
with tubes down our throats and wires applied with stickers
and love by a nurse that isn’t paid enough but still he arrives
with a bucket and a sponge to clean your soiled bottom, to
plump up your pillows as he turns you side to side, rocking
you gently and whispering that you will wake, from your
safe spirit’s realm, will visit us again and decide to stay
this time.

Note: ‘nadi’ and ‘dharya’ are the Urdu/Hindi words for tributary and river respectively.

Shereen Akhtar was a gay British Pakistani writer and poet. Her posthumous debut, Rabbi/Robin, is published by Blue Diode Press. This is a previously unpublished poem. Rabbi / Robin by Shereen Akhtar | Blue Diode Publishing