by Wasima Khan
They used to call this wind Kusi,
soft, southern, bearer of trade and stories.
It brought the dhow,
tilting into the harbor like a hymn,
its hull fat with cloves and longing.
Now the wind bites.
It scrapes the skin off rooftops,
drags the sea into courtyards
where children once raced pigeons
and grandmothers washed grief from their feet.
We were told to move inland,
but inland is someone else’s loss,
someone else’s story
buried under eucalyptus roots
and the white spires of old mission churches.
Do you know how it feels
to watch the ocean unlearn your name?
My mother spoke to the moon
as if it were kin.
Now she speaks to no one,
listens for fish that no longer come.
They are gone.
The reef fish, the coral’s color,
the rhythms we read in the tide
like verses from a holy book.
The men at the docks sit silent.
They no longer mend their nets.
They mend their eyes instead,
staring inland,
at a future that will not wait for them.
And yet,
there are days when
the light folds just right,
when jasmine returns to the air,
when a boy finds a shell that hums
the old song,
and for a moment
we believe
that memory
might hold the water back.
Wasima Khan is a writer and jurist based in The Hague, the Netherlands. Her poetry is forthcoming in About Place Journal.
Hawaii Pacific Review 