Translated from the Urdu by G. A. Chaussee
Rome
I want to know—
When Rome was burning
and Nero was playing his flute,
who were the people there for it all?
Who had his ear turned to the flute?
And whose eyes
glimmered in the light of the fire?
I want to know—
Who were the people praising Nero’s flutistry?
And who were fanning the embers?
How many comfortable homes were offered up to that fire?
How many magnificent buildings
turned to heaps of ash?
How many people’s bones
scattered like dust?
How many beautiful bodies
melted like candles of wax?
How many epic dramas,
how many tragic melodies,
how many songs of disappointment and love,
how many impressions of hope and heart-suspending allure
passed into nothingness?
Dismayed by the fire’s ferocity,
how many dreams vanished from the page of being?
I want to see
the record of that decimation of Rome.
Or perhaps somewhere to find
just a list of the people, the structures, the things
destroyed in that fire for all time.
Or even just to know—
When the conflagration broke out,
who were the people there with Nero,
and who were there with Rome?
Karachi
Karachi
is a forest
where you see darkness, noise,
and a thousand trees of fear
conversing with the sky
in a voice raised so high
that no one living
inside or outside the city
can even hear another’s screams.
In truth, Karachi now
isn’t a city at all.
It’s rather a cry choked out
in a state of mortal peril
briefly echoed all around.
No one has even the slightest idea
that this might also be
the cry of someone alone
calling for help.
Karachi’s taken for
an inhuman throng
by those who don’t come to assist.
Or a crowd of the blind
who get hungry
and are fed only rice pudding;
who cry out
and are made to sit through speeches;
they take each other by the hand
or not,
they move,
and draw gunfire into the air.
But now in Karachi
the firing is no longer confined just to the air.
Bullets and the sounds they make
are showing up in people’s dreams.
Karachi, though, is not a city of dreams.
There’s just one place to wait for dreams to come.
For our convenience
we use it
as a seaport
or even as a makeshift laboratory.
Where we
perform no experiments on human bodies
as everyone knows.
For that, rabbits are used
or white rats
whose fecundity
upon approaching the limits of safety
draws rat poison
and cats
from the capital.