Synkroniciti is honored to welcome back poet Saba Husain of Houston with two thoughtful and deeply moving poems. “To My Grandchildren: What is Poetry?” acknowledges that we are all unknowable and mysterious. Part of the reason we write poetry or make art is to communicate who we are and to leave something for future generations to acknowledge us, but there is too much to express. A poet’s work is to record patterns of transcendence, knowing that they cannot tell the whole story. This mutability is both frustrating and beautiful.
“I was a girl/ with dangly legs/ slung over a brick wall.// I was a woman gathering words/ I loved,/ and pausing between thoughts.// What happens between our first and last/ often remains unread.”
“The Storm at Tranquility Bay” was one of our poetry finalists. A storm hitting the Florida Keys foreshadows the break-up of a marriage. The day before all is paradise.
“A white egret on the deck held out against the wind,/ looking across the bay, silent, as if to say/ there was no need for time, or place, or creed.”
The evening brings more wind and excitement.
“We sat/ on cane chairs and watched the wind/ leap like animals clawing each other’s backs.”
She stays awake while her husband goes to bed.
“Morning. Towels were strewn on the sand./ I saw no canopies, but the sound of canvas/ crashed through the air. How soundly you slept/ when I came inside to wring the sea out of my skin and hair.”
Storms are ominous, especially coastal, island storms, and we sense that there is something ominous in this relationship, although that is never spoken. He is able to sleep through the worst of it, but she is not.
Saba has a way of creating simple elegance through restraint, gentle repetition, alliteration and assonance. Assonance is the use of repeated vowel sounds to spice and structure a poem, as opposed to alliteration which does the same with consonants. She is a master of subtlety and sensitivity, which makes it all the more poignant when she delivers emotional weight.
Read Saba’s remarkable and lovely poetry in Synkroniciti’s “Patterns” issue, Vol. 7, No. 4, available for purchase here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Saba Husain is a Pakistani American poet. Her book of poetry is Elegy for My Tongue (Terrapin Books 2023). Her poems appear in Barrow Street, Cimarron Review, La Piccioletta Barca, On the Seawall, Puerto del Sol, Sequestrum, Synkroniciti, The Shore, Texas Review, Third Coast, and Verse Daily, as well as Poetry in English from Pakistan: a 21st Century Anthology, Southern Poetry Anthology, Vol VIII: TX, and What the House Knows.
Saba is a Pushcart Prize nominee, a 2023 Perugia Press Prize finalist and a 2021 and 2020 X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize finalist. She was the winner of the 2022 Spring Equinox Hot Poet Poetry Contest. She serves on the board of Mutabilis Press and holds a B.A. in Creative Writing from University of Houston.