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    Gülistan: A Home of Flowers
    Gülistan: A Home of Flowers
    Gülistan: A Home of Flowers
    Ebook187 pages1 hour

    Gülistan: A Home of Flowers

    By Zakiah Sayeed

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    About this ebook

    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
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAuthorHouse
    Release dateMar 21, 2019
    ISBN9781728303130
    Gülistan: A Home of Flowers
    Author

    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.

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      Book preview

      Gülistan - Zakiah Sayeed

      Gülistan

      A Home of Flowers

      ZAKIAH SAYEED

      45156.png

      AuthorHouse™

      1663 Liberty Drive

      Bloomington, IN 47403

      www.authorhouse.com

      Phone: 1 (800) 839-8640

      © 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

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