Translated from the Urdu by M. A. R. Habib
Near the Window
Lamp of Love’s chamber, awake!
Wake from this joyful floor of soft dreams
Your body still tired from night’s pleasure
Come by me, lover, near the window
And see with what passion dawn’s rays
Kiss the minarets of our city’s mosque
Whose height brings to mind my Age-long desire
With your silver-white hands, my lover
Open those wine-dark, bewildering eyes
See this minaret
Watered by early light
Beneath its shadow, I remember
A mournful, penniless priest
Drowsing in a dark, hidden corner
Like a useless god
A devil, distressed!
Here is the stain of three hundred years
An indignity without cure.
See the crowd in the marketplace
Moving, an endless flow
As jinns in the wastelands
Emerge at early evening, bearing torches
A bride-like figure sits
In the corner of each man’s heart
The tiny lantern of Self flickers
Without strength to burst into
Spinning flame
Among these are the poor, the sick
Below the heavens tyranny marches on.
I an old, weary, ambling horse
Ridden by Hunger, hard and robust
I too, like others in the city
Come out, after each night of love, to
All this rubbish
The sky is turning where
At night I return to this same house
Knowing my helplessness, I peer again
Through this window
At the minarets of our city’s mosque
When they kiss the red sky a sad farewell.
Deserted Sheba
Solomon, head in his hands, and Sheba desolate
Sheba desolate, the home of ghosts
Sheba an abysmal lake of woes
World devoid of grass, greenery and flower
Winds thirsty for rain
Birds of the desert, beaks tucked beneath their wing
And Man, choked on dust
Solomon, head in his hands, bitterly disheveled hair
World dominion, world administration, merely
the bounding of a deer.
Love a leaping flame, lust the odor of odorless flowers
Speak less of the age’s mysteries!
Sheba is wasted for still on her soil
Are footprints of a ravaging conqueror
Sheba is no more, nor her beautiful queen
Solomon, head in his hands:
From where now will come a joyful envoy?
From where, which jar, will come wine into
The bowl of old age?
Oil Merchants
For one black mole the towns of Buqara and Samarqand!*
But where now are Buqara and Samarqand?
Buqara and Samarqand are lost in dreams
Hidden in the veils of an azure silence
Their doors closed to travelers
Like the eyelids of a beautiful sleeping woman
Preserved from the lash of Russian “Pantheism”
Two beauties!
Forget Buqara and Samarqand
And think now of your shining cities
Of the roofs, doors and terraces of
Tehran and Masshad
Look to the
Pleasant fountains of your age of sense and action
And these beautiful metaphors of your new hopes
Make high the low walls
Of these splendid cities
Post your sentries at every tower and rampart
And in your homes, silence all sound
Save the wind
For outside, beneath the city walls
Robbers have long been pitching their tents
Dressed as oil merchants
Tomorrow or tonight at dark
They’ll come as guests
To your houses
To drink from the goblets
Of the banquet night
They’ll dance, sing
And laugh impulsively, noisily
To warm the blood of the gathering!
But when dawn breaks
Then you will dig
Graves for your dead with your eyelashes
Then you’ll shed tears
On the ashes of merriment’s stage
We also have shed tears
—Though the black mole is worthless
That deep oozing ulcer which arose on earth’s cheek
From Europeans’ murdering lust—
We also have shed tears
Cities, like liquid shadows, dissolving in waste
Falling roofs and doors
Minarets and domes
But time is an arch
And our enemy passes through its curved flanks
Rolling down its lower horizon
Imprisoning and whipping
Our naked, lean bodies
Our tyrant begins to sweat in his own fire
Place your hand in mine!
Place your hand in mine!
For I have seen
Rays on the peaks of Alwand and Himaliya*
Through them at last will break
A Sun
Longing for this, Buqara and Samarqand
Have long been beggars.