This cycle of poems traces a coming-of-age shaped by childhood memory, family life, gendered experience, and political awareness. Moving between intimacy and critique, the texts combine direct, conversational language with emotional precision.
Several poems return to childhood as a fragile state of care and innocence gradually replaced by endurance. Spring to Fall and Bread and Milk chart this shift through bodily detail, seasonal metaphor, and domestic ritual, marking the moment when safety gives way to awareness. Interior spaces become symbols of longing and restraint: in Just a Window, the desire for a window stands for the need to be heard, to escape confinement, and to speak beyond human walls.
Family appears as both refuge and tension. Familia offers an affectionate, unsentimental portrait of everyday bonds shaped by contradiction, humor, and loyalty. Social and political consciousness emerges more sharply in Men and Jhelum, which confront patriarchy, nationalism, and inherited violence. The river Jhelum becomes both beauty and graveyard, carrying memory, loss, and unresolved conflict across borders.
Together, these poems favor lived detail over abstraction, allowing personal memory, domestic life, and political reality to intersect. The cycle forms a fragmented but coherent narrative of growing up—learning how to endure, how to speak, and how to remain tender within instability.
The project is part of the subthemes The Poetics of Care – Intimacy, Tenderness, Repair inn Writing After – Catastrophe, Memory, and the Archive of Loss.
Author
Asmara Zafar
Asmara Zafar is a creative writer working in poetry and prose. Some of her work has been published in an anthology. Her writing explores themes such as nature, nostalgia, social issues including patriarchy, and often overlooked aspects of everyday life.
Alongside poetry and prose, she also writes short stories, scripts, captions, and pitches, and has experience creating content for different platforms and audiences, particularly on social media. She enjoys adapting creative work into short video formats and blog content. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Literature.
