A woman arrives in a city that was never hers and soon becomes a fragment of that whole.

Read my latest verse in Spark that tells the woman’s story and her relationship with the city that took her hostage.

A Love Affair

This city was never hers
She belonged to a calmer origin
Where the sun rose and set unabated
By sounds and dust and other filters

Now she lives in a place where
The sun in incidental and silence is a transgressor
Her shadow on the walls of her house is
A pantomime magnified on cracked lime

The city was never hers
But she now belonged to the city
She inherited her labels from it
She bequeathed its various moods

Her parents wondered why
She laboured in a place far away
In that cauldron that consumed
Dreams, peace and sleep

They did not know that she was escaping
Memory’s short-changing trap
An unrequited love, an unfulfilled wish
And a relentless, unremitting ache

Her surrender was an escape
And the city gladly took her hostage
She was now a part of a whole
A speck of dust in a giant dustbowl

The city was her lover now
Filling the voids she surrendered with
She roamed within its ironclad doors
Free as a bird in a giant cage