Are we already full with the vacuum of leaving?
Imagine these doors and walls, these walls

and doors through which you used to walk
out into the cloudy day, these shadows of

well meaning faces. Will they all suffice?
Will the pools of rain grow colder when

you stand no more before me clad
in your lovely gray shawl – when you

no longer have your gaze fixed on the ground,
your smile fixed onto what meaning may abide?

Ah, living must be an art and we
apprentices – whenever we speak of

remembrance we say ‘always’;
we intend this ‘always’ and desire

those promises to hold in our books and poems
with which we tend our minds and wounds.

You say how I have changed you. I say,
how all is changed when it rains in our regions.

—
Taimur Khan