Letter to a Lost Lover

Momina Raza

A poem after Barbara Hamby.

'Lovers' by Mikuláš Galanda (charcoal sketch)

Is there a theological Urdu word to describe what

has happened

between us, like, barzakh, which is 

used 

for washing blood away from my hands, but after I 

walk to the next haveli,

I wash my hands again; or faqadān

which is an emptiness that remembers and aches

for many years

perhaps, for eternity even after

all scars have healed,

this wound shall remain blooming.

Sara Shagufta confesses, weaving a language of silence:

“These eyes, this heart, give it

to a hollow man.”

I long for a word for someone who looks into her lover’s face

and sees his smooth skin peel off like a candle’s wax that has

burnt with endless ardour in the sleepless nights of Lahore where

childless mothers tie red threads in shrines, a dog 

howling at what used to be divine, motia blooming with grief,

mistaking tears as rain drops, counting each like penance,

books everywhere, Agha Shahid Ali on Naheed, Ghose under Rafat,

writings all scribbled with stories of lost lovers, once sipping

coffee in a bookshop, tenderness woven into fingers that tremble

to feel the same love they lost in the crowded streets of 

Liberty Market, endowed with my grandmother’s silk sarees,

I can see what he sees—all my books dog-eared 

to safely honour the flowers my friends gifted me in sepia 

toned books as souvenirs, remnants gently wrapping

itself in ink and memories, feet adorned with red paint and

gold anklets, flashing like wheat in lush fields, veins

flowing like rivers of milk, eyes as bright as hope in hospitals,

how unlucky we are to love in distance, for a moment,

I can’t help but think of Shagufta, a fire burning her soul, looking

at the man she loved, thorns for hands, saying,

“I dress myself in my pain”. As I turn those pages, I feel the heat of

your absence, a symphony lost in longing, as the book 

closes, the spine arching its back, moaning a prayer.

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Momina Raza is a writer from Lahore, Pakistan. She holds an MPhil degree in English Literature from Kinnaird College for Women. She was selected as a finalist for the 2025-26 Pakistan Youth Poet Laureate program in English. Momina’s work has been published in journals such as Borderless and Pandemonium among others.  You can find her on Instagram @momina17_.

Mikuláš Galanda was a painter and illustrator and one of the most important pioneers and propagators of Slovak modern art. From 1914 to 1916 he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest. In 1922 he enrolled in the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. From 1923 to 1927 he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. He died on 5 June 1938 in Bratislava. In all his work, he strove to formulate the Slovakian artistic modernism on the basis of achievements in the development of European painting. He was inclined towards expressionist and cubist trends, and created his own form of painting on this basis. He was considered to be a lyric painter of female beauty and charm.