Aaliya presents a moving, moonlit poem exploring love and longing on DifferentTruths.com, capturing the timeless nature of shared emotional memory.
Under a few stars and a puff of clouds,
moon strikes me as an indoor swing –
it oscillates besides your ancestral tree –
a shared compound that launches our
flight, has been yours, all along
I belong somewhere in the centre, gazing upwards, with
a similar nostalgia for the moon
While you and the moon are so like the past,
and my fascination for you both is unaltered
It's my memory of me that
refuses to be anything evocative!
Who would have cared for chasing poems
when held by the lover's muse?
But, from then on, whenever I
longed to be held by you
I looked at the moon with a delightful admiration –
I still look at it the same way!
Picture design by Anumita Roy
Dr Aaliya Mushtaq Baba, PhD (Department of English, University of Kashmir), navigates the intersections of politics, philosophy, and autobiographical writing. She has been engaged in literary academia across three universities in the region for over six years. An accomplished poet, her work has appeared in Miraas, Sheeraza, Kashmir Lit, English Studies in India, and Setu (Pittsburgh, USA). Her poetry also finds a place in The Kali Project: Invoking the Goddess Within/Indian Women’s Voices and Love and Longing: An International Anthology of Poems. With the recent release of her debut collection, Ode to Silence, her poetic voice continues to resonate through literary landscapes.
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