two poems by Aaliyah Kara

Aaliyah Kara | October 24th, 2016 | poetry | No Comments

Poem

Home

Home is in rooms carved from the heart
of many colours

The saffron ice cream
scooped into bowls
on special occasions
The unpleasant surprise
of cardamom
in a dish of spiced biryani

Home is in the rooms carved from the heart
of many colours

Where your perfectly chopped onions
are not balanced by the tea you boiled over
by mistake

home is in the classroom carved from the heart

where your family tells you what to use
to colour in the world
and that’s’ that

– home is not a lab
where you experiment
initiate your own theories
challenge the customary

home is where music is forbidden
where not only the white man’s drum
is the drum of Satan

where prayers are poured into the coconut oil
your grandmother plaits into your hair

home is in the rooms carved from
the stories of women

who sold samoosas and supported families
and earned the money they held
in their calloused hands

from the struggles
woven into bread baskets
and knitted into the jerseys
they gifted to their grandchildren

from the secrets spilled into marinades
and the songs hummed
to get that colic baby to sleep

from the oven burns and razor cuts
and the painful sessions waxing off bikini hair

home is in the rooms carved from the heart
of many colours

that siblings shared
and guests visited

that birth and death and sickness seeped through

home is in the rooms carved from the heart
of many colours

where you hear
aunts cackling
and uncles laughing
at their own jokes

where there is a cure for every ailment
without visiting the drug store

and girls and boys gossip about the neighbours

home is in the rooms carved from
slices of history
and slivers of the past

that we yearn to leave because
we can’t relate to our relatives,
find familiarity with our family

but home is in the rooms carved from the heart
of many colours

and somehow

you always end up
coming home

Poem 2

We Thought

we thought June 16

was the last
students had to
thrown stones

we thought Marikana

was the last
of state scored
violence

so we marched
misdirected

to an enemy
never found –

too busy battling
against our own.

Poet Bio


Aaliyah believes in art for social change. She is a Third-year student of English literature at Wits University. In 2015, she was placed in the Top 8 of the Spoken Word for the World competition. She reads, writes and loves to argue.

Click to rate this post!
[Total: 8 Average: 4.8]
(Visited 335 times, 1 visits today)