Two Poems
Ridah Najaf
Chaotic Freedom
I met her at a jazz café
Her eyes shut, a light smile on her face
It’s like she became the music
The chaos of all elements
Was collectively drawn together
She made it her peace
I could never understand the love she had
For the overwhelming sensations
“It’s like playing the trumpet/ and making love” (Matt Rohrer)
Both could be crazy yet beautiful
“I call it untamed improvisations,” she said that night
And our ephemeral fawning done,
Harmony Holiday had once said to me
It’s the freedom of our own expressions
The melody of the mundane
And then I began to understand,
There is beauty in this chaotic freedom
Gray World
Cold concrete
Gray like the sky
Zeus is here!
Rain trickles down
Like the tears
Of a grieving widow.
Life is cruel and vain
I am its odalisque
Trying to break
Through the gray walls.
The entities of existence
Consume my paradise in gallons
It is a gloomy world.
Zeus-
“The cloud gatherer”
Dissolves the blue sky.
I am left in the fog
Of this ashen Earth;
Colorblind candor.
Leave me on the concrete until
I can see past
This gray world.
Ridah Najaf is a senior at Rutgers university. These poems were written in a creative writing course taught by Professor Emily Hughes, who selected the pieces for publication in WHR.