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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.