Mareeha Wajdan
The Unspoken Recipe
My grandmother’s hands,
a direction for rivers I had not yet sailed
would soak the rice for “Biryani”
Not with measured cups, but with handful
Without any scatter or a doubt
She spoke a language of the intuition
a silent alchemy I yearned to learn
I returned with a notebook,
wanting to catch her flavor
to dissect the scent of star anise and home.
“Grandmother, how much salt?”
She smiled, a crack around her ancient eyes
and touched my cheek
“Enough until it feels like too much”
I fumbled with spoons and teaspoons
my modern tools blunt against her wisdom of pinches
My rice were hard, devoid of softness
my spices clumsy with doubt
The day she left, the recipe died
But sometimes, in my own kitchen,
my hands, which are becoming her hands,
will toss a salt-shaker with a flick she taught my bones
And I understand:
She never gave the ingredients,
because the recipe was never in the food
It was in the making, the patient rise,
the warmth passed from her palm to mine
the taste came to me in line
the only thing she ever truly meant to give
Author’s Notes:
I wrote this poem because I needed to articulate a specific, aching kind of loss that lives in the space between generations. It’s a feeling so many of us know: the desperate race to document a culture that feels like it’s slipping through our fingers with every elder we lose. For me, this poem isn’t just about Biryani; it’s about the entire, unspoken language of my heritage. I was that granddaughter with the notebook. I believed that tradition could be captured in grams and milliliters, that I could preserve my grandmother’s love in a bullet-point list. Her refusal to give me concrete answers felt, at the time, like a barrier. It was frustrating. I thought, "Don't you want me to carry this on? Why won't you just tell me?" But the poem is my realization that she was telling me. The recipe was in the flick of her hands, the quiet concentration in her eyes, the specific softness of the rice beneath her fingers. She wasn't teaching me how to make Biryani; she was teaching me a way of being—a patience, an intuition, a connection to process that transcends instruction manuals. The real inheritance wasn't the dish, but the embodied knowledge. When I write that "my hands, which are becoming her hands," it’s the truest line I know. It’s that startling moment in my own kitchen where I do something without thinking, and her spirit is there in the motion. The poem is my testament to the fact that what our grandmothers give us cannot be contained by words. It is written in our bones, and we only learn to read it by living, by doing, and finally, by letting go of the need to measure and instead, learning to feel.
The Freezerburn of Ordinary Things
My mind is not a haunted house.
It is a kitchen at 2 a.m.
The hum of the refrigerator is the only God.
It promises preservation, but delivers
only freezerburn on every good intention.
The ice cubes taste of static and tin.
I wear the world like a wool sweater
two sizes too small. Each thread
is a rule: Smile. Nod. Say fine.
The itch is magnificent, a conspiracy
of a thousand tiny laws against my skin.
I am raw in a universe of knit.
I saw a pigeon with a mangled foot
today. It pecked at concrete,
and I understood the sermon.
Hunger is a blunt instrument.
It doesn't care about the foot,
the sky, the children pointing.
It says: Here is bread. Here is pain.
Now, choose. There is no choosing.
Author’s Words:
The “clumsy weapon” of love in the drawer is the most raw confession. It is the furious, tongueless love I have for those I’ve hurt, which is too sharp to wield without causing damage, so I’ve immobilized it. I take it out alone, feel its terrible heft, and know it is both my deepest failure and my only true possession. The “crushing reality” the poem names is the exhausting permanence of this inner clutter—the psychic furniture of past shames that cannot be discarded, only rearranged. The “miracle” of forgetting the weight of my own head for a second is not grace; it’s a fleeting systems failure in the ongoing ordeal of consciousness. The poem, then, is not a cry for help, but a ground-level report from a life spent building a tolerable existence beneath a ceiling of quiet, relentless pressure. It is the archaeology of a present moment, brushing the dust off the artifacts of a persistent, unspectacular survival.
Author’s Biography:
Hello, I'm Mareeha, a Pakistani poet with a passion for weaving words into stories and emotions. I craft poetry that touches hearts and sparks imagination. When I'm not writing, you can find me lost in a good book, exploring new cultures or sipping tea and dreaming up my next verse.