2 poems by Z.R. Ghani

The Giant’s Mountain

A spider roofed with delirious eyeballs,

the mountain keeps its seabirds in sockets.

Are they gannets beading the rain-pillowed earth?

My eye is a beetle dangling

from a leaf, accepting the view as a mystery:

the fine line between what you see

and what you suspect exists

blends like silt and air paused in permafrost.

Spindrifts smudge

the sun silver, wafting where wings fan

out into scallop shells for shelter.

Where death cannot die

life conspires to self-destruct. The ocean

bludgeons a mimetolith to blowhole, to

bridge with polar claws gloved in bridal lace.

Voracious caves thirst for diligent waves

throwing tongue

after tongue. A language assembles in my mind;

I wrestle with it like a Viking longship

clambering to the shore, and gulp. You can’t be fluent

in a process that thrives on change. The fury

of the giants reigns eternal here. My footprints

in the black sand grimace, and from afar, a yellow

coat shrivels.

My heart fusses like a bird locked in Fox’s jaws, flapping

as though in flight. I blink

and the raincoat is gone.

Diamond Beach

What am I to do with these clambering waves

and erosion of time, the choicest parts of me

embayed by the four winds to foreign coasts?

Where do you hide if not in plain sight

as you scour me to kneel? The naked eye

sees a caress as you butcher me discreetly –

A bowl of milk slurping a black cat.

Tourists buff me with their gloves on

and take photographs at the best angles, only

to forget. They see sculptural boredom,

once charming tarpaulin – bleeding

diamonds defunct along the shore.

__________

Z.R. Ghani is a poet from London. Her poems have appeared in Magma, Mslexia, Under the Radar, and many more journals. In 2024 her pamphlet In the Name of Red was published by The Emma Press and in the same year a poem from the book was The Guardian's 'Poem of the Week'.