This Is Not a Love Poem

I could never tell when poets wrote

about lovers, or when it was about

nations—they were one and the same,

heartbroken dirges unspooled from

the centre of chests, till the yarn,

stained red with blood and revolution,

tied the ideas of patriotism into place,

nestling it between the political and the personal.

This is not a love poem, and this is not

a mournful lament, this is not anger, and

this is not passion—I leave those to the

ones who seem to know how I should love

my country better than I ever will—this is

a mere query into the heart of the matter.

Will I ever be allowed to speak without

a predictated, preexisting, predestined script?

Will my hands ever look like hands, and not

cogs and keys, fitted into giant machinery,

and will my eyes ever be simply eyes, not

curators and cataloguers of unrelenting

thrusts on those I call my own, marked away as

incidental costs, just another in the state’s

budget of predetermined lives that can be

expended each year, in search of greatness?

Will the poetry I’ve written to my lovers ever

echo in the words I spew trying to make sense

of what a country means to me? Will I ever find

myself confused between the love I’ve given,

and the love I feel? A watan is not just a country,

it’s a homeland, bound to its people with

shared memories and histories, so will my

country, nation, and watan ever be one?