Pharmacology and the body at midnight
I'm a final-year medical student in Lahore and the distinction between memorising the pharmacology of opioid receptors at midnight and writing a poem about pain at midnight has become, I'm noticing, increasingly thin. I write poetry in Urdu and in English, which are genuinely different activities. Urdu poetry has a formal tradition I'm drawing from, the ghazal particularly, though I am not writing classical ghazals but something that uses the form loosely. English poetry is freer and also stranger for me because the emotional register of English is not where I was raised. I find this useful. I write things in English that I couldn't write in Urdu without them landing differently. I'm in my final year at King Edward Medical University and the exams are in three months and I write anyway, on my phone, in the margins of the study schedule. The poems have been getting longer. I have one in progress that is about the anatomy practical from last year, the formaldehyde smell, the silence of the room, and what it does to your relationship with the word 'body' when you've spent four hours with one on a table. I don't know if it's a good poem. I know it's true.