Gülistan: A Home of Flowers

By Zakiah Sayeed

This is an autobiographical and fictional collection of poems and narratives exploring my distinctly Indian perspective, welcoming readers to a world of raw beauty, true emotion, and sometimes painful reality.

Life is an individual journey—taken collectively, so I fantasize . . . a lot!

The baring of these personal truths, the sharing of our encounters and the nature of our viewpoint, however, is what creates a sense of community and shared experience that fulfills us in ways we cannot replicate alone. It is the paradox of being human: our aloneness and togetherness at once integral to whom we are. For me, baring my soul to the world, releasing these intensely personal thoughts and feelings, is a freeing experience. Within these pages are solace and inspiration, happiness and sorrow, and a warm feeling of connection and shared understanding. Free verse poetry and flash fiction, it relies on a stream of consciousness and (hopefully) ethereal connection cascading into awareness rather than preconceived rhythm and rhyme. I have tried to artfully craft poetry and prose of myself and my homeland and have tried to bring smiles with the conversations of grandchildren on these pages.

I am hoping that my words portray my emotions with resonance and beauty and with fearless honesty.

Here are a couple of my poems to tease your fantasy with.

Apoptosis

My grandmother always said
Winning is not the end all and be all~
By winning, we sanctioned avarice.
We need to learn and be wise
Wisdom lasts and lasts.
But we gain wisdom by losing
And by yielding, we become the sky!
But what of dying?
The deaths I have known
Of people known and unknown
Of loves that were here and gone
All in split seconds.
And soon anything means everything
What is left of dying?
A heartache?
A wail that tears the sky?
A sob that echoes through the night?
The shell of a body loved and lost?
Each cell shriveled and disintegrated?
Such games a human gets to play
All in the name of fate!

(Apoptosis is defined in medical lingo as “death of cells.”)

Cabin Fever

I turn to poetry in times of sadness, darkness, loneliness, and many other times. It is delusional really to be so into my moods that I have to write poetry. Most of my poems are love poems. They don’t rhyme, there is no name for them, and I do not follow any rules. I just write whatever comes to mind. Telling me to write a certain type of poetry literally chokes me.

If you had my eyes
you would see this river
going south, feeling the sky at its horizon
and holding the wind on its breast
If you had my eyes
you would see it hiding behind the little hills
you would see the flowers lower their gaze
along the bends of our dreamlands
If you had my ears
you would hear the hush of dawn
the turtle doves on the windowsill
the cicadas buzzing and the sound of water
lapping on the riverbank
If you had my heart
you would come to me
breathe my breath
and know the fragrance of jasmine in my hair
If you had my heart
you would not leave me alone here
but take me outside and sing our songs
and talk to me about our love
And if you had my heart
you would let your thoughts surrender
to the rush of the river, the road, a piece of sky
anything~
to get me out of here, my love!

—Zakiah Sayeed

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Mar 21, 2019
• ISBN: 9781728303130

Zakiah Sayeed

Zakiah Sayeed was born in India, and migrated to the United States in the mid sixties. She is the author of another book of poems, and stories of her life in India, titled Stray Thoughts/Winged Words. She and her husband of fifty one years, live in Quincy, Illinois.

Book preview

Gülistan

A Home of Flowers

ZAKIAH SAYEED

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AuthorHouse™

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.authorhouse.com

Phone: [phone]

© 2019 Zakiah Sayeed. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse  03/20/2019

ISBN: 978-1-7283-0299-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-7283-0300-0 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-7283-0313-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019902644

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Dedication

Introduction

My Faded Tapestry

What Makes a Place a Home?

A Bearable Aloneness

A Lullaby

A Marriage Proposal

A Night in Hawaii

A Story from the Past

Farmer’s Almanac

Voices in the Head

An Ode to Our Earth

Remembering Childhood, With Gratitude

Owls

Lost Recipe

Constellations and Winter Planets

Desert and Its Winds

Questions

Perhaps

The Phone Call

Indelible Lines

Bells

Patience

Nets

Evening News

Summer Rains

Children Of Yemen And Syria

Apoptosis

Childhood

Morning Sun

Endless Journey

When You Walked Away

Time

The Monsoon Symphony

The Soul, the Heart, the River!

My Song

Why

Love

Why Do We Fight

The Best Poet

Doing Chores

War

The Fragrance Of The Earth

Mangoes

A Message

Boys and Their Language!

Mother And Daughter

Madness

Clueless

Simplicity

Last Night’s Story

Rapport

Your Voice

Resuscitation

The Man from Payson

What Do I Tell the Wind?

Davis

Betrayal

Torture

Symphony Of Rain

Love

That Look in Your Eyes Again

War(s) and Such

Feeling

Begging For Sleep

Southern Hospitality

Power Failure

Putting it Together

How I Celebrated My First Birthday

So much Carnage

The Power of a Name

Walls

Prejudice

Life in the Village

Can I? May I? Should I?

Sadist

Lipstick on the Glass

Come Fall

This Old House

Extraordinary

A Tiny Seed

Committed To a Glossy Fate

Rushing

Unyielding

River Blues

Martin Luther King’s Birthday

Home as it was

The Wait

Silence

Solitude

Would You Like a Copy?

Seeds

Mother

Storm Clouds

My Supplication

Class Act

Advent Of Winter

A Winter Evening

My Vagabond Traveler

Designs In The Carpet

I Wonder

Gulistan. (A Home of Flowers)

The Secret

Cabin Fever

And The Moonlight Laughed

Written in the Stars

Zain’s First Birthday (my youngest grandson)

Childhood And Imagination

The Winning Love

About the Author

Dedication

I dedicate this book to my amazing children Saadia and Sayeed. They have taught me to have peace in my heart; I have learnt humility from them and feel so blessed that they have graced my life with their love.

Introduction

Listen to the presences inside poems

Let them take you where they will~~~ Rumi.

In this book I have tried to make sense of all the ramblings that go helter-skelter in an insomniac mind. I have tried to humor my misgiving, have cried at the mistakes, wondered at the loss of family and friends, and have certainly laughed at the innocence of grandchildren. Friends ask me, Did you really have all these experiences? I smile and think to myself, the best accolade is when your made-up words and stories ring true, and the reader feels almost sorry that they are merely figments of imagination.

Growing up in India, embracing the rich culture of that amazing land, and touching people with smiles in the eyes and warmth in the heart has broadened my outlook about the life of this land. Simplicity of that land, enriched my life. There are so many knots in the tapestry of life, some of them cleverly hidden and others hang on tenaciously to the threshold of my soul, begging, always begging to be noticed….and so my pen chants the simple memories of an ancient land, on blank paper.

This book is a tapestry of sort, gossamer and transparent, of the innocence of childhood, the exhilaration of youth, the Divine gift of children and grandchildren, and the unconventional stories that are all linked together, true and untrue.

All of us like to listen to stories. I tell stories and write poetry so I can breathe and survive.

"Even after all this time the sun never says to the earth you owe me—

Look what happens with a love like that

It Lights the whole sky."~~~ Hafez.

My Faded Tapestry

I tried weaving some dreams last night,

But the tapestry of my dreams showed

Knots that were irregular, torn, faded, and gnarly! I tried

Smoothing them, my old fingers and wrinkled knuckles

Cajoling the knots out of the quaint fabric of my age,

Touching faces that were young once

And eyes that laughed and welcomed

My touch. But that was a long time ago.

Now the tough knots scorn my weakness. I searched

Within my heart to find the young me, the youth

That could weave dreams without knots, but I was not there.

I couldn’t find me in all the chambers of my heart,

Now paper thin,

And I didn’t see me leaning against the corridors

Of the old pulsating walls either. There was emptiness

All around, except for the flutter of whimsical dreams

That threatened to let the world know of

My failure as a weaver of dreams and passion!

I should stop trying to weave my dreams into a tapestry.

What Makes a Place a Home?

Growing up in India was different from living in this country. My mother came from a well-known family of the Deccan plateau in India. We lived well; the house was great. Life in general was good. Every time my parents went out for the evening, leaving us behind with the servants, we used to make such mischief at home that the servants would go crazy. Really, we were hooligans from hell. But the minute we would see the headlights coming through the gates, we would sit quietly on the sofas, pretending to be angels.

Mother would enter the parlor first, hug us and say, It is so good to be home. I missed you kids. Even though they would only be gone for a few hours, she would always say that. She never commented about our flushed faces or the reek of sweat from our bodies.

Coming into your own home feels like there is no other place like this on earth. My humble home is so much more comfortable than the Pudukotta Palace we just visited. Words like that made me wonder many times if my mother was normal.

Our home was not small by any stretch of imagination, but next to a palace, it seemed like a hut to me. She would also say, When you children grow up and have your own homes, you will realize how even a two-room hut would seem like a palace.

When I came to this country in the mid-sixties, I left behind my home, my things, my flowers, my beautiful sitar that I played, and above all, my family and friends. We rented a small, single-bedroom apartment in south St. Louis. It was on the third floor of a seedy-looking building. I did not know how to cook. (That’s a story for another time.) So I started experimenting with simple things, like boiling rice or eggs. As it turned out, that was neither simple nor easy! Later, I found some friends at the hospital, and we started hanging out with them. It was then, that I remembered my mother’s saying. Every Friday or Saturday when I was not on call we would go visiting friends, and at the end of the evening, when we returned to our small apartment, I felt like I was crossing the threshold into my own palace.

This was where my heart was. This was a feeling of belonging. There was comfort and peace in this little place. This was my home.

Now, my children have their own beautiful homes, but whenever they come here– especially Sayeed, who used to live in the big city of Chicago– they always made my heart swell with pride when they would say, Mom, I love coming home! And I know my daughter Saadia feels just the same.

Home really is where the heart is. The feeling is overpowering and is a blessing. It is not the material thing that has to do with what you have. It’s a feeling–like a warm blanket covering your cold feet on a winter night, like the roaring fire in the hearth that warms your heart and makes you smile. These feelings describe to me what a home really is.

A Bearable Aloneness

I questioned him about my destination;

He told me to keep walking

Even though there was no place for me to go to.

Don’t visualize the distances, he said;

"We humans cannot gauge them

Let the distances come to your threshold