“this spring,” by Aamina Mughal
April 25, 2024
you let spring make you lazy,
it seeps like honey into your bones until they’re heavy
and sinking like grand ships with holes
in their hulls. spring makes ruins
of you. you watch the sunrise over a still lake,
a morning of soft pastel though you wished
for water set ablaze and light that sang.
you fall out of and back into age —
your age,
a new age,
innocence and enlightenment.
you decide if god is real, sat
at a library table, dissecting sanctity like a butcher.
next year,
you will thaw under a newborn sun,
fresh and low in the sky. our city
will manage a breath with aching lungs,
shaky with an
inhale, an
exhale,
that shifts dunes back into place.
it’s ash-lined and smoke-filled,
breathing around swallowed dust.
one day,
your streams will carve pre modern portraits into mountain
sides and nothing but the ghosts you inherited will haunt you.
someday,
you might shake the plasma from
a nebulous present like a wet dog.
today,
you will excavate the childhood chill from your tired bones
and ask it
not to bite.
This poem was written by Aamina Mughal, as a 2023-24 Youth Poetry Fellow. Performed at the Seattle Arts & Lectures Literary Arts Series event with Gabrielle Zevin on Thursday, April 25, 2024 at Town Hall Seattle.