“Admission” by Farah Ghafoor
Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “Admission” by Farah Ghafoor, part of the 2025 Poem in Your Pocket Day collection.
Admission
By Farah Ghafoor
Little brute! Sirening his hungers, clattering stones down the stairs, booming
canon to his hollow bowl. And what is that? The floating thing
from my mouth – trilling creature of what was
my hard voice – and my heart a fruit reversed to flowering.
The family cat disregards all this, but don’t all children?
Amorphous, tail tall as a blunt sword,
the shameless prince and his violent agenda: tormenting the resident
parakeets, soaking his feet in my eggs, climbing demurely
out of the toilet.
I am warned of his attachment: You will leave, so make him love you
less. And how I had listened to him those first few nights, motherless
and keening, as if I too had suffered so.
But later, when I woke him with the hallway switch
and made candles of his eyes, I hesitated.
Stroking his nape until he waded back
into those black unconscious seas, there
I became strange to infinity.
Look at me now, waiting on his gaze directed to the life
beyond the window, colder with each visit. I complain
to my friends while cupping a treat under his indifferent jaw,
that I can only catch him when he drifts off like a tide of smoke,
the soft comma around my hand just letting me through.
Copyright © Farah Ghafoor
Published as part of the 2025 Poem in Your Pocket Day collection
Farah Ghafoor is the author of Shadow Price (House of Anansi, 2025). Selections of her debut won the E.J. Pratt Medal and Prize in Poetry, and were finalists for the CBC Poetry Prize and the Far Horizons Award. Her work appears in art exhibitions, magazines, anthologies, and post-secondary course curriculums. Farah resides in Tkaranto (Toronto) where she writes about the intersection of climate change, colonialism, and capitalism.
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