Love’s Noise

The riveting sound of a grass aerator
spills over the dark passage hypnotic
after a chair squeaks through wind
outside the man bent frantically levels
the weeded patches some are too thick
like moments cast by random reaching
unaware that interceptions are natural
a woodpecker knocked and afterwards
the phone burred craving hands and mouth
the topsoil with the sub-soil like fragments
stripped hanging along squelching lumps
the machine pierced its teeth into the turf
guzzled spitting shreds all over the place
how much I miss you with that noise.

Rizwan Akhtar’s debut collection Lahore, I Am Coming (2017) was published by Punjab University Press. He works as an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Punjab University, Lahore, Pakistan. He has published poems in well-established poetry magazines in the UK, the US, India, Canada, and New Zealand. He was a part of the workshop on poetry with Derek Walcott at the University of Essex in 2010.

Read more of Rizwan here.