Far From The Courtyard Poem by Tabassum Kaniz

In this foreign winter
the air has no memory of turmeric
or boiled rice rising with noon.

My window shows a sky
that does not know the call of azan
melting into evening crows.
It is a sky without gossiping rooftops,
without kites tangled in electric wires.

Home—
you are a red-oxide floor still warm
from my mother's hurried footsteps,
a steel plate ringing softly
like a small, faithful moon.

Here, the nights are carpeted and quiet.
No rickshaw bells.
No distant train sighing through fog.
Only the hum of a heater
trying to imitate human breath.

I carry you like folded sari-cloth
inside my chest—
your monsoon smell of wet earth,
your mango-sticky summers,
your power-cut evenings lit by stories.

Sometimes I taste salt—
not from the sea,
but from Padma-shaped tears
spilling quietly into borrowed pillows.

Home is not a place now.
It is a lantern
I cup inside both palms,
afraid the wind of elsewhere
might learn how to blow.