A collaboration poem of two Worlds - Shukla Rebeiro from India & ©️ Shahid Abbas Pakistan

The Moon has no Visa - Shukla Rebeiro 


I stand on the Indian side of the border,
Where barbed wires stretch like unfinished stories.
They taught us to fear the land beyond the gates,
Yet your words arrived softer than peace itself.
Between India and Pakistan lie fences, soldiers, and history,
But also the same rain, the same poetry, the same aching moon.
Sometimes I wonder — if borders disappeared for a day,
Would our hearts finally speak without fear?
From India, I send you verses wrapped in tricolour skies,
Hoping they reach you beyond the guarded lines.
The border may divide our countries into two names,
But it cannot divide the language of longing.
Every evening, as the flags lower on both sides,
I imagine silence standing between us instead of war.
Perhaps somewhere beyond the noise of history,
Two souls are still allowed to meet.
I belong to India, to crowded streets and monsoon songs,
To temples, tea stalls, and memories stitched in saffron light.
And still, across the border called Pakistan,
There exists a voice my heart recognizes.
Strange, isn’t it?
How maps can separate nations,
Yet one simple conversation
Can make the distance feel so small.


Shukla Rebeiro from India


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Across the Unwritten Horizon - Shahid Abbas 


I stand again
on the edge of an unseen silence
where the map forgets to breathe.
I keep looking
as if somewhere across the line
a gaze is looking back at me.
We were never asked
if we wished to be divided.
Nor were we asked
how to stay whole after breaking.
The body learned distance,
but something inside refused it.
Thoughts still travel without permission.
Words still cross borders unseen.
Sometimes even tears
forget how to fall.
Partition was never a single grief.
It multiplied itself
inside wind, inside dust, inside memory.
The earth was separated
but never truly separated.
Rivers still remember continuity.
Skies still ignore ownership.
Birds still refuse passports.
So I ask again
are borders in land
or in the mind
or in the tired heart
that learned to accept them?
When longing rises
the ground feels heavy with sadness.
And eyes, quietly,
throw dust back at the sky
as if to reach what is lost.
Above everything human made,
heaven still holds no division.
There, even distances
lean into each other like old friends.
We were not born enemies.
We learned it later.
There is no language in nature
that denies recognition.
No gaze that refuses another gaze.
What happened to us
between belonging and separation?
We were once together.
We can still exist together.
And perhaps, in some unnamed future,
we will again.
Religions speak of unity
in many voices.
Yet unity itself
was never a voice
it was always a state of being.
We did not choose arrival.
We will not choose departure.
This brief moment between them
is all we are given.
And still
we live it as fracture
instead of connection.
Maybe memory will remain
when everything else fails.
Maybe words will survive
what bodies could not hold.
And maybe one day
we will stop asking
where the line was drawn
and start asking
why we ever believed
it belonged to us.


©️ Shahid Abbas Pakistan