In this my cottage, there’s nothing.
A game of simple love
we play
in the growing hollowness of night and day,
crying, singing, laughing
together,
just an excuse to keep the heart alive, no more.
Words have limits, Jahanzad, meaning a limit.
Love, youth, tears and smiles,
All have limits.
(Have then the pain of loss
and isolation no limit, no end?)
In my cottage
many aromas
hover about me,
like the smell of that one night they cling.
What dusty aromas linger here—
aromas of my poverty, loneliness,
memories and desires.
But still in this cottage, dirty, disheveled,
there’s nothing,
though sometimes the song of birds drifts from far trees,
and fragrance from gardens of olives and figs.
Then I’m cheered
and glad to have bathed and emerged.
Else, in this house, there’s no bed, no perfume,
not even a fan.
The love you know so well
is beyond my strength.
You’ll laugh, Jahanzad, at my strangeness,
my bounty with emotion,
my worship of things,
my seeking a wealth which is not mine.
You who laughed that night at my vacillation
laugh, laugh again at my divided state!
Yet who from love has found anything beyond self?
Jahanzad, all questions
of love have but one answer:
A lover.
It is enough that the heart’s voice should echo.
Jahanzad,
it was the voice in a corner of my heart
echoing
at the shores of my art, frozen in time.
Your eyes were an ocean whose endless gaze
froze those shores in their stilled centuries.
Ocean, mirror of my Self,
of the faces of my pots destroyed and created;
of each art and its worshipper,
the mirror.
III
Jahanzad,
the pool of that tavern at Aleppo, that silence of night
where we swam, embracing,
waves outspreading, circle around circle:
We swam the whole night, holding
each other, body and soul,
swimming with delightful fear,
just as water swims in tears,
content in each other, against the tide of age.
You teased me: “Your longing, Hassan, has
dragged you even here!”
But now a fear swims in my heart,
I left my body in that pool at Aleppo,
yet no dualism haunts me.
Even now, I’ve faith that body and soul are one,
faith that absorbed
me into self.
Before all else I am “self.”
If only we exist, still
I am
self before all things.
How could I betray this?
Women like you,
complex beyond
Unraveling,
no one has been able to understand.
To say I had unveiled your depth
would be self-deceit.
The fabric of Woman is self-satire
for which we are no answer
(Who is Labib? Words of whom all night
stole from your lips,
who was it kept pulling at your hair,
tearing at your lips,
as I never could?
Yes, whether myself or Labib,
If a rival, why, for the pristine delight of your self-knowledge,
which walks, like the morning, in several voices?
Labib, the negation of every favoring voice!)
Yet ours is not a union of water and dust, nor ever was.
These elements have lived always outside Man,
nor was jar or pitcher always born of their union.
They can yield but one illusion,
let it be.
Jahanzad, you
he and I,
we, angles of an ancient triangle,
have always wandered, like the
turning of my potter’s wheel,
but found no trace of ourselves.
If you wish, I’ll break the triangle. But
The spell of the wheel on me is this old triangle:
The eyes of my wheel that stare at me,
turning.
On pitcher and jar your body, color, your tenderness
fell,
your beauty’s alchemy
washing me in a flood of inner light.
Citizens of my inner world poured out into the streets,
As if hearing the cry of the morning azan.
All the pots in becoming, became “you.”
This meeting’s ecstasy has devoured me.
This is the crisis of cup, goblet, and pitcher—
cleaved from the essence of water and dust,
they achieve the triumph of new direction.
(I, a poor potter:
what do I know of this extreme
mystic intuition of
each cup, goblet, and pitcher?)
Jahanzad,
today I am waiting still, but why?
Just as I was for nine wretched years.
But now my waiting is not for the river of tears,
nor the wayward night
(I’ve talked so much of that night of sin
this too is now a sin)—
neither for the pool of the inn at Aleppo,
nor for Death, nor my broken self.
Yet in timeless waiting I am bound,
as moments arrive and pause in timeless time,
so this burden of time has fallen from my head.
All the dead, all past faces,
the sluggish caravans of all incidents
have awakened inside me
the stirring of a world regained,
as heaven awakes in the unconsciousness of God.
I woke, lying on the sand of drowsiness,
on the sand lay those pots,
outside my being,
shattered forever
in the chasm between me and myself.
They became whole once more (like some voice of providence).
They became once more a timeless dance,
a vision of eternity.
IV
Jahanzad, how after a thousand years,
scraps of my jars, enamels and flowerpots
are found
in every alley of a buried city,
as if they were its memory.
(A young potter, by the name of Hassan, in a new city,
still making pots, still loving,
was strung by us in the threads of his past,
with and within us—as though he were us—he is merged,
for you and I were the drops of rain,
that all through the night, a night stretching a thousand years,
falling across a windowpane continually traced snake lines,
and here, before the morning of time,
we and this youthful potter
are strung once more in a dream.)
Jahanzad, how
this crowd, worshippers of the past,
has entered the corpses of these pots,
see!
These are the people whose eyes
never pierced jar or pitcher.
Today, once again, they turn this way and that
The lifeless creations of color and oil.
Will they ever find, beneath these, the sparks of grief
that devoured history?
Will they ever hear the storms, the tempests
that devoured every scream?
What do they know
of the rainbow that brought my colors—
mine and this young potter’s?
What do they know of that butterfly’s wings,
the qualities of that beauty, with which
I shaped the faces of these pots?
See these people, each his own prisoner.
The age, Jahanzad, is an enchanted tower
and these people are imprisoned in it.
The young potter laughs!
These naive savages, their garments torn
by their own stature, reaching for
some glory beyond reach,
what do they know of the demon, inevitable, in my heart’s cave,
who forewarned me (and this young potter),
“Hassan the potter, awake!
The pains of prophethood have their day of reckoning,
which approaches your parched cups and pitchers!”
This is the call behind which, Hassan,
the young potter,
moves from age to age,
autumn to autumn,
unceasing.
Jahanzad, I, Hassan the potter, have
suffered this pain of prophethood in wilderness
after wilderness.
Will these people, a thousand years hence
reassembling the pieces, ever know
how the color and oil of my dust and earth
merged with your delicate limbs
to become eternity’s voice?
Through my pores, every pore,
I would absorb
your expansive embraces,
I would make offerings
in the temple of the eyes of those to come.
Should they trace the art and culture of these fragments, so be it,
how shall they ever bring back Hassan the potter?
Or count the drops of his sweat,
or find even the shadow of this art’s splendor?
Which has grown from age to age,
autumn to autumn,
which, in the new self of each potter,
ever grows?
The shadow of that art through which
none is anything but love,
none is anything but a potter?
We are full of knowledge, and know nothing.
We are, like God, wholly the gods of our art.
(Hopes are shallow and deep)
Faces swim in the eyes of senselessness,
faces never seen.
Where could their trace be found?
Who has ever honored the tradition of grief?
The corpses of these pots,
etceteras of some mortal story,
are our azan, the sign of our inquiry.
In the silence of their hour of death they speak:
“We are the eyes which open inwardly,
which gaze at you, seeking out every pain,
knowing the secret of each beauty.
We are the longing of that night’s empty room,
where one face, like a tree branch,
leaning over another,
had left in each human heart
a rose petal.
We are that night’s stolen kiss.”
Translated from Urdu by M.A.R. Habib
FAIZ AHMAD FAIZ
A Prison Evening
From the winding maze of evening stars,
step by step descends the night.
The breeze passes close by, thus,
as if someone murmurs a word of love.
The exiled trees of the prison yard,
heads bent, are engrossed in drawing
patterns and sketches on the sky’s skirt.
On the roof’s shoulder gleams
the fair hand of moonlight’s affection.
The glitter of stars has dissolved in dust,
the sky’s blue melted in a splendor of light.
In green corners, shadows of blue
bloom, as in the heart
the pain of separation surges.
Constantly, thought reassures the heart:
so sweet is life at this moment.
Those who stir tyranny’s poison
will succeed neither today nor tomorrow.
So what if they have already extinguished
the candles in the bridal chamber of love?
Show us if they can put out the moon!
Translated from Urdu by Waqas Khwaja
At the Sinai Valley
Once again lightning flashes across the Sinai Valley,
once again a flame blazes on reality’s face—
the invitation to behold that reality, a message of death.
O far-seeing eye
Now is the time to witness, even if the spirit is flagging.
Now the executioner has become also the physician of grief’s distress,
the garden of Iram looks like desolation’s wasteland.
Has passion’s pride
the courage to travel the road of annihilation or not?
Again lightning flashes across the Sinai Valley.
O far-seeing eye
wipe clean your heart once more. Perhaps on its tablet
some new compact between I and Thou may be inscribed.
Today, oppression is the custom of the great and noble of this earth,
support of oppression, a convenience of religion’s magistrate.
To reverse centuries of abject allegiance,
today, a decree of defiance must descend.
Translated from Urdu by Waqas Khwaja
Don’t Ask Me, Dear, for That First Love Again
Don’t ask me, dear, for that first love again—
I once believed life drew its light from you.
In the torment of your love, what cared I for time and fortune?
Your face affirmed the advent of spring,
the world had nothing to match your eyes:
if you were mine, destiny itself would bend before me.
It wasn’t thus, I had only wished it so.
There are other cares in the world than love,
comforts other than the meeting of lovers.
The dark sorcery of unfolding centuries,
woven in satin, in brocades and silk,
bodies on sale everywhere in lanes and streets,
besmeared in dust and bathed in blood.
The eye is drawn to them too, ah, well!
You no doubt are lovely still, ah, well!
There are other cares in the world than love,
comforts other than the meeting of lovers.
Don’t ask me, dear, for that first love again.
Translated from Urdu by Waqas Khwaja
Go Forth into the Streets Today in Your Fetters
A damp eye, a distraught life, is not
enough,
the imputation of a secret passion, is
not enough.
Go forth into the streets today in
your fetters.
Your hands alight
entranced and dancing, go!
Dust in your head
bloodstains on your shirtfront, go!
The whole city of love
awaits you, go!
The city’s chief
the ordinary masses
the arrow of blame
the stone of abuse
the unhappy morning
the failed day—
who else is their familiar
but us?
Who in the beloved’s city
is clean anymore?
Who remains worthy
of the executioner’s hand?
Pick up the goods of your heart
brokenhearted, let’s go!
Ourselves, then, we may present
for execution, friends, let’s go!
Translated from Urdu by Waqas Khwaja
My Heart, Fellow Traveler
My heart, fellow traveler,
it is again commanded
that you and I be banished
to call in lanes and b
yways
and turn to unknown places,
to find some sign or portent
of some loved one’s message bearer
and ask of every stranger
news of our home and homeland—
in streets of unknown people
to tend the day to darkness,
a word exchanged with this,
sometimes that other person.
What shall I tell you of it?
The pain of night is fearful.
This too would be enough if we
could keep a count of sorrow.
What would we care for dying
were there no death tomorrow?
Translated from Urdu by Waqas Khwaja
We, Who Were Killed in the Dark Pathways
For Julius and Ethel Rosenberg
Longing for the flowers of your lips, we
offered ourselves to a dry gallows tree.
Yearning for the torches of your hands, we
were killed in the dimly lit pathways.
On crosses beyond our reach
the color of your lips leapt and flamed
the rapture of your locks continued to rain
the silver of your hands gleamed.
When tyranny’s night dissolved in your paths
we slogged on, as far as our feet would go
a love song on our lips, a candle of grief in the heart.
Our grief was witness to your loveliness.
See, we have remained true to our witness,
we, who were killed in the dark pathways.
If we were fated to remain unfulfilled
our love was but of our own devising.
Who complains, then, if the paths of aspiration
all led to parting in the fields of execution?
Picking up our banners from these killing fields
other caravans of lovers will go forth
from whose journey of longing our steps
have shortened the passage of pain.
For whom, relinquishing our lives, we have made
sovereign the credit of your loveliness in the world—
we, who were killed in the dark pathways.
Translated from Urdu by Waqas Khwaja
USTAD DAMAN
He Knows Not What He Must Express
He knows not what he must express,
What all he utters when he speaks—
Here even a bald pye-dog believes
He is a moon no shadow cleaves.
Modern Poetry of Pakistan Page 7