Synkroniciti is thrilled to welcome back Houston poet Saba Husain with “Ghazal: Belonging.” Saba was one of the poets featured in our inaugural issue five years ago, and we have missed her evocative poetry with its gentle music. This poem is a seven stanza ghazal, complete with the traditional poet’s autograph in the final stanza. The refrain is a single word: “belonging,” dancing through this meditation on America–the way it calls immigrants and yet does not completely embrace them. “I wore my native self when I arrived, naïve to history and assimilation’s needs/ The years it took to unlearn illusions and to carve out my own belonging…” Saba paints scenes quickly and seemingly effortlessly: the chattering of squirrels taking her back to Pakistan where they were crows, the immensity of American skies and cities, the innocence of a boy enjoying a sugar cake his mother has magically made in a tent camp. We must learn to care for one another, not because we are the same, but because our differences are precious. This is visionary poetry, spun light as air and transparent so that we can see the wonder that is still possible in this fractured world.
Read “Ghazal: Belonging” in Synkroniciti’s “Belonging” issue, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Saba Husain is a Pakistani American poet. Elegy for My Tongue (Terrapin Books, 2023) is her first poetry collection. Her work appears in Barrow Street, Cimarron Review, On the Seawall, Puerto del Sol, Southern Poetry Anthology, Synkroniciti, Texas Review, Third Coast, The Shore, and Verse Daily. She was a 2023 Perugia Press Prize finalist and received first place in the 2022 Spring Equinox Hot Poet Poetry Contest. She collaborated on a short poetry film, The Case for the Sun, the Wind, and the Oak Trees for Houston Public Poetry’s 2024 Reel Poetry International Festival. Saba serves on the board of Mutabilis Press and holds a B.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Houston.