Old Dreams – Shabana Nasreen

A gust of wind, shook my paltry cupboard
Where rusty dreams are stored.
Dreams like frail frames of a broken window
I never mended,
Hovered upon my naked face
Like a silhouette of an unknown.
In a moment of frenzy,
I drew my curtains, closed my window,
Blurred my vision and stood still.
A graveyard of sorrow
I buried long ago
Like wild creepers
Entwined the whole of me.
A farrago of emotions began to submerge
my senses into a pool of thick water.
I could hardly breath.
I faintly remember,
Last summer
While you drove me home,
Your eyes met with scars of my harrowing past,
You, at once, plastered words into my skin,
Detergents couldn’t wash away.
Every morning,
I could smell your utterance
Following me in a lone street,
Singing lullabies in my empty ears,

Slowly,
beating drums into my hollow chest
Until I raise the volume of my piano.
Hastily, I did turn the pages of my notebook
Where I made a catalog of my emotions,
Only to find out
My oblivion could barely touch you.
I, being afraid couldn’t move an inch
year after year
Into the pithole you threw me
Until the stench of my own tears
made me wake up to reality.
I shut your surreal image,
Your insipid words,
Your morality
Into a thin frame and
Locked it up within my old cupboard.
Like an uninvited guest
I sent my dreams too
Till you felt safe.
Now,
As I glare at my withered dreams,
The unfamiliarity shakes me up from within.
I wonder,
Do old dreams water old past?
Or do they outlast?

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Shabana Nasreen is a Research Scholar in the Department of English, Diamond Harbour Women’s University. She is also a Guest Faculty in the Department of English, Jadavpur University. She has presented papers at several national and international seminars and has published research articles in Web of Science Indexed, UGC Care Listed and Peer-Reviewed Journals. She has been a dedicated teacher of English at Convergence since July 2023, and teaches the language at various levels.