Journal of Postcolonial Writing

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Elegy for Benazir Bhutto; Iron Trunk; Iris

Adrian A. Husain

To cite this article: Adrian A. Husain (2011) Elegy for�Benazir�Bhutto; Iron Trunk; Iris, Journal of
Postcolonial Writing, 47:2, 224-226, DOI: 10.1080/17449855.2011.557232

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2011.557232

Published online: 20 Apr 2011.

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Journal of Postcolonial Writing
Vol. 47, No. 2, May 2011, 224–226

POETRY
Elegy
Journal
10.1080/17449855.2011.557232
RJPW_A_557232.sgm
1744-9855
Taylor
2011
20Article
47
bijouatkar@yahoo.com
AdrianHusain
00000May
&
and
ofFrancis
Postcolonial
(print)/1744-9863
Francis
2011 Writing
(online)

for Benazir Bhutto

Adrian A. Husain

Charmed back from exile

by fond hopes
blandishments

you alighted
to our
tributes.

Heedless of
what lay
ahead

flags, garlands
roadside clamourings
and the vague promise

of a future
drew you on.
We

should have known

the moment of
betrayal:

your head turned away

the insidious hand
risen

the macabre
festivity of
death.

Today,
accomplices, we plot
your homecoming

in reverse.
December yawns like a grave.
It is all
over.

© 2011, Adrian A. Husain

ISSN 1744-9855 print/ISSN 1744-9863 online

DOI: 10.1080/17449855.2011.557232
http://www.informaworld.com
 Journal of Postcolonial Writing 225

Iron Trunk
Adrian A. Husain

Unconvinced the journey here was really worth it,

our movables mope under the stairs.
Ethnic rugs, black trunk,
valanced pelmet and Edwardian chairs
sit demure but dejected
in their improvised space.
The trunk, with its endemic patina
of rust and faded white lettering,
has an elephant’s memory,
unable, as it is, to forget
the pangs and cicatrices
of a longer, older migration.
The inscriptions render three names:
of a mother
and a daughter
and as if by lot
a place,
a city where the past, inadvertent
halting for a moment
disembarked.

© 2011, Adrian A. Husain

226 Poetry

Iris
In Memoriam Iris Murdoch
Adrian A. Husain

Not the flower your steady gaze

not the coloured forgave
deep our speciousness,
of the eye one of the “pantomimes”
you were still
but, less imitably, in the person of Arrowby
radiant boy-woman to abjure
with short-cropped hair Iris, time was the enemy
jeans Time was the sea-snake
and fictions in your handbag Charles Arrowby saw
coiling and uncoiling
one evening itself against the sky
in the sixties delivering, green-eyed
in the Warden’s Lodgings mouth unprettily open
in our college at Oxford all of its entwined lengths
complex black volume.
as risen like a moon
you stood So summoned
obscured from view the past returned,
by your husband nudging old ghosts
not far possibilities,
above
Epstein’s Lazarus though bearing
or gin in hand no rainbow
slipped volatile among the guests Iris

only a rainy dark

and then nothing -

nothing
but an anamnesic hiss.

© 2011, Adrian A. Husain

Notes on contributor
Adrian Husain is the winner of the 1968 Guinness Poetry Prize and author of a poetry collection Desert
Album (1997) in Oxford UP Pakistan’s Golden Jubilee series. His poems have appeared in Encounter,
Outposts, Rialto, Pax and other literary journals. He graduated from New College, Oxford and received
his PhD from the University of East Anglia, writing his thesis on Shakespeare and Machiavelli. He
has since written Politics and Genre in Hamlet (2004). Email: bijouatkar@yahoo.com