greatpoetry | Entries tagged with agha shahid ali

duathir.livejournal.com

Beyond the Ash Rains'
'What have you known of loss
That makes you different from other men?'
- Gilgamesh

When the desert refused my history,
Refused to acknowledge that I had lived
there, with you, among a vanished tribe,

two, three thousand years ago, you parted
the dawn rain, its thickest monsoon curtains,

and beckoned me to the northern canyons.
There, among the red rocks, you lived alone.
I had still not learned the style of nomads:

to walk between the rain drops to keep dry.
Wet and cold, I spoke like a poor man,

without irony. You showed me the relics
of our former life, proof that we'd at last
found each other, but in your arms I felt

singled out for loss. When you lit the fire
and poured the wine, "I am going," I murmured,
repeatedly, "going where no one has been
and no one will be... Will you come with me?"
You took my hand, and we walked through the streets

of an emptied world, vulnerable
to our suddenly bare history in which I was,

but you said won't again be, singled
out for loss in your arms, won't ever again
be exiled, never again, from your arms.

by Agha Shahid Ali

iatrogenicmyth.livejournal.com

“Each ray of sunshine is seven minutes old,”

Serge told me in New York one December night.

“So when I look at the sky, I see the past?”

“Yes, Yes," he said. “especially on a clear day.”

On January 19, 1987,

as I very early in the morning

drove my sister to Tucson International,

suddenly on Alvernon and 22nd Street

the sliding doors of the fog were opened,

and the snow, which had fallen all night, now

sun-dazzled, blinded us, the earth whitened

out, as if by cocaine, the desert’s plants,

its mineral-hard colors extinguished,

wine frozen in the veins of the cactus.

* * *

The Desert Smells Like Rain: in it I read:

The syrup from which sacred wine is made

is extracted from the saguaros each

summer. The Papagos place it in jars,

where the last of it softens, then darkens

into a color of blood though it tastes

strangely sweet, almost white, like a dry wine.

As I tell Sameetah this, we are still

seven miles away. “And you know the flowers

of the saguaros bloom only at night?”

We are driving slowly, the road is glass.

“Imagine where we are was a sea once.

Just imagine!” The sky is relentlessly

sapphire, and the past is happening quickly:

the saguaros have opened themselves, stretched

out their arms to rays millions of years old,

in each ray a secret of the planet’s

origin, the rays hurting each cactus

into memory, a human memory

for they are human, the Papagos say:

not only because they have arms and veins

and secrets. But because they too are a tribe,

vulnerable to massacre. “It is like

the end, perhaps the beginning of the world,”

Sameetah says, staring at their snow-sleeved

arms. And we are driving by the ocean

that evaporated here, by its shores,

the past now happening so quickly that each

stoplight hurts us into memory, the sky

taking rapid notes on us as we turn

at Tucson Boulevard and drive into

the airport, and I realize that the earth

is thawing from longing into longing and

that we are being forgotten by those arms.

* * *

At the airport I stared after her plane

till the window was

again a mirror.

As I drove back to the foothills, the fog

shut its doors behind me on Alvernon,

and I breathed the dried seas

the earth had lost,

their forsaken shores. And I remembered

another moment that refers only

to itself:

in New Delhi one night

as Begum Akhtar sang, the lights went out.

It was perhaps during the Bangladesh War,

perhaps there were sirens,

air-raid warnings.

But the audience, hushed, did not stir.

The microphone was dead, but she went on

singing, and her voice

was coming from far

away, as if she had already died.

And just before the lights did flood her

again, melting the frost

of her diamond

into rays, it was, like this turning dark

of fog, a moment when only a lost sea

can be heard, a time

to recollect

every shadow, everything the earth was losing,

a time to think of everything the earth

and I had lost, of all

that I would lose,

of all that I was losing.

Note from

iatrogenicmyth: it would be so awesome if someone would go through the archives of this community and

theysaid and tag the poems by topic as well as by poet, perhaps using the categories from the search feature at poetryfoundation.org since they seem to have a pretty good model for searching by topic. I would definitely volunteer to be a part of this effort, were it to occur. Anyone think this is a good idea or would be interested in participating?

keonaa.livejournal.com

Notes on the Sea's Existence

1

Yellow island, yellow sun:
My struggle began
with a soft wave,
which offered love
on the shore's terms.
Wearing a mask of glares,
the white, white sand
touched me with fire.

I held myself together,
a still breath.

( Read more... )

angelicazefiro.livejournal.com

A Footnote to History

For ten centuries
they sent no word

though I often heard
through seashells

ships whispering for help.

I stuffed my pockets
with the sounds of wrecks.

I still can’t decipher
scripts of storms

as I leaf through
the river’s waves.

By Agha Shahid Ali

lyryk.livejournal.com

living in the desert
has taught me to go inside myself
for shade
—Richard Shelton

Certain landscapes insist on fidelity.
Why else would a poet of this desert
go deep inside himself for shade?
Only there do the perished tribes live.
The desert insists, always: Be faithful,
even to those who no longer exist.

The Hohokam lived here for 1500 years.
In his shade, the poet sees one of their women,
beautiful, her voice low as summer thunder.
Each night she saw, among the culinary ashes,
what the earth does only through a terrible pressure—
the fire, in minutes, transforming the coal into diamonds.

I left the desert at night—to return
to the East. From the plane I saw Tucson’s lights
shatter into blue diamonds. My eyes dazzled
as we climbed higher: below a thin cloud,
and only for a moment, I saw those blue lights fade
into the outlines of a vanished village.

bohemiabythesea.livejournal.com

( You're about to view content that the poster has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

lyryk.livejournal.com

On the occasion of Agha Shahid Ali's death anniversary today, I thought I'd share one of my favourite poems by him.

Beyond the Ash Rains

'What have you known of loss
That makes you different from other men?'
- Gilgamesh

When the desert refused my history,
Refused to acknowledge that I had lived
there, with you, among a vanished tribe,

two, three thousand years ago, you parted
the dawn rain, its thickest monsoon curtains,

and beckoned me to the northern canyons.
There, among the red rocks, you lived alone.
I had still not learned the style of nomads:

to walk between the rain drops to keep dry.
Wet and cold, I spoke like a poor man,

without irony. You showed me the relics
of our former life, proof that we'd at last
found each other, but in your arms I felt

singled out for loss. When you lit the fire
and poured the wine, "I am going," I murmured,
repeatedly, "going where no one has been
and no one will be... Will you come with me?"
You took my hand, and we walked through the streets

of an emptied world, vulnerable
to our suddenly bare history in which I was,

but you said won't again be, singled
out for loss in your arms, won't ever again
be exiled, never again, from your arms.

lyryk.livejournal.com

A Prison Evening by Faiz Ahmed Faiz
Translated from the Urdu by Agha Shahid Ali

Each star a rung,
night comes down the spiral
staircase of the evening.
The breeze passes by so very close
as if someone just happened to speak of love.
In the courtyard,
the trees are absorbed refugees
embroidering maps of return on the sky.
On the roof,
the moon - lovingly, generously -
is turning the stars
into a dust of sheen.
From every corner, dark-green shadows,
in ripples, come towards me.
At any moment they may break over me,
like the waves of pain each time I remember
this separation from my lover.

This thought keeps consoling me:
though tyrants may command that lamps be smashed
in rooms where lovers are destined to meet,
they cannot snuff out the moon, so today,
nor tomorrow, no tyranny will succeed,
no poison of torture make me bitter,
if just one evening in prison
can be so strangely sweet,
if just one moment anywhere on this earth.

( In Urdu )

aimlesswanderer.livejournal.com

The Dacca Gauzes
by Agha Shahid Ali

…for a whole year he sought
to accumulate the most exquisite
Dacca gauzes.

– OSCAR WILDE, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Those transparent Dacca gauzes
known as woven air, running
water, evening dew:

a dead art now, dead over
a hundred years. ‘No one
now knows,’ my grandmother says,

‘what it was to wear
or touch that cloth.’ She wore
it once, an heirloom sari from

her mother’s dowry, proved
genuine when it was pulled, all
six yards, through a ring.

Years later when it tore,
many handkerchiefs embroidered
with gold-thread paisleys

were distributed among
the nieces and daughters-in-law.
Those too now lost.

In history we learned: the hands
of weavers were amputated,
the looms of Bengal silenced,

and the cotton shipped raw
by the British to England.
History of little use to her,

my grandmother just says
how the muslins of today
seem so coarse and that only

in autumn, should one wake up
at dawn to pray, can one
feel that same texture again.

One morning, she says, the air
was dew-starched: she pulled
it absently through her ring.

smithkingsley.livejournal.com

(on the occasion of his eighth death anniversary today)

It pulls me to itself,
the reflection, no, not mine:
I know the water's fidelity,

its utter transparence. The sea
becomes me like nothing
else: I wear it like skin.

Who pulls me with such
ease? A dead ancestor,
a lost friend, or

the shell's hollow cry?
The weeds wrap me, like arms.
I'm pulled down, down, to the tip of the sky.

I hold the world as I drown.

smithkingsley.livejournal.com

To mark the first anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the city of Mumbai.

Land

Swear by the olive in the God-kissed land—
There is no sugar in the promised land.

Why must the bars turn neon now when, Love,
I’m already drunk in your capitalist land?

If home is found on both sides of the globe,
home is of course here—and always a missed land.

The hour’s come to redeem the pledge (not wholly?)
in Fate’s "Long years ago we made a tryst" land.

Clearly, these men were here only to destroy,
a mosque now the dust of a prejudiced land.

Will the Doomsayers die, bitten with envy,
when springtime returns to our dismissed land?

The prisons fill with the cries of children.
Then how do you subsist, how do you persist, Land?

“Is my love nothing for I’ve borne no children?”
I’m with you, Sappho, in that anarchist land.

A hurricane is born when the wings flutter ...
Where will the butterfly, on my wrist, land?

You made me wait for one who wasn’t even there
though summer had finished in that tourist land.

Do the blind hold temples close to their eyes
when we steal their gods for our atheist land?

Abandoned bride, Night throws down her jewels
so Rome—on our descent—is an amethyst land.

At the moment the heart turns terrorist,
are Shahid’s arms broken, O Promised Land?

smithkingsley.livejournal.com

That which then was ours, my love,
don't ask me for that love again.
The world was then gold, burnished with light --
and only because of you. That what I had believed.
How could one weep for sorrows other than yours?
How could one have any sorrow but the one you gave?
So what were these protests, these rumors of injustice?
A glimpse of your face was evidence of springtime.
The sky, wherever I looked, was nothing but your eyes.
If you'd fall in my arms, Fate would be helpless.

All this I'd thought, all this I'd believed.
But there were other sorrows, comforts other than love.
The rich had cast their spell on history:
dark centuries had been embroidered on brocades and silks
Bitter threads began to unravel before me
as I went into alleys and in open markets
saw bodies plastered with ash, bathed in blood.
I saw them sold and bought, again and again.
This too deserves attention. I can't help but look back
when I return from those alleys -- what should one do?
There are other sorrows in this world,
comforts other than love.
Don't ask me, my love, for that love again.

(translated by Agha Shahid Ali)

smithkingsley.livejournal.com

We Who Were Executed

(After reading the letters of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg)

I longed for your lips, dreamed of their roses:
I was hanged from the dry branch of the scaffold.
I wanted to touch your hands, their silver light:
I was murdered in the half-light of dim lanes.

And there where you were crucified,
so far away from my words,
you still were beautiful:
color kept clinging to your lips –
rapture was still vivid in your hair –
light remained silvering in your hands.

When the night of cruelty merged with the roads you had taken,
I came as far as my feet could bring me,
on my lips the phrase of a song,
my heart lit up only by sorrow.
This sorrow was my testimony to your beauty –
Look! I remained a witness till the end,
I who was killed in the darkest lanes.

It’s true – that not to reach you was fate –
but who’ll deny that to love you
was entirely in my hands?
So why complain if these matters of desire
brought me inevitably to the execution grounds?

Why complain? Holding up our sorrows as banners,
new lovers will emerge
from the lanes where we were killed
and embark, in caravans, on those highways of desire.
It’s because of them that we shortened the distances of sorrow,
it’s because of them that we went out to make the world our own,
we who were murdered in the darkest lanes.

(translated from the Urdu by Agha Shahid Ali)

smithkingsley.livejournal.com

'What have you known of loss
That makes you different from other men?'
- Gilgamesh

When the desert refused my history,
Refused to acknowledge that I had lived
there, with you, among a vanished tribe,

two, three thousand years ago, you parted
the dawn rain, its thickest monsoon curtains,

and beckoned me to the northern canyons.
There, among the red rocks, you lived alone.
I had still not learned the style of nomads:

to walk between the rain drops to keep dry.
Wet and cold, I spoke like a poor man,

without irony. You showed me the relics
of our former life, proof that we'd at last
found each other, but in your arms I felt

singled out for loss. When you lit the fire
and poured the wine, "I am going," I murmured,
repeatedly, "going where no one has been
and no one will be... Will you come with me?"
You took my hand, and we walked through the streets

of an emptied world, vulnerable
to our suddenly bare history in which I was,

but you said won't again be, singled
out for loss in your arms, won't ever again
be exiled, never again, from your arms.

smithkingsley.livejournal.com

Kashmir shrinks into my mailbox,
my home a neat four by six inches.

I always loved neatness. Now I hold
the half-inch Himalayas in my hand.

This is home. And this the closest
I'll ever be to home. When I return,
the colors won't be so brilliant,
the Jhelum's waters so clean,
so ultramarine. My love
so overexposed.

And my memory will be a little
out of focus, it in
a giant negative, black
and white, still undeveloped.

smithkingsley.livejournal.com

On each patch of green, from one shade to the next,
the noon is erasing itself by wiping out all color,
becoming pale, desolation everywhere,
the poison of exile painted on the walls.
In the distance,
there are terrible sorrows, like tides:
they draw back, swell, become full, subside.
They've turned the horizon to mist.
And behind that mist is the city of lights,
my city of many lights.

How will I return to you, my city,
where is the road to your lights? My hopes
are in retreat, exhausted by these unlit, broken walls,
and my heart, their leader, is in terrible doubt.

But let all be well, my city, if under
cover of darkness, in a final attack,
my heart leads its reserves of longings
and storms you tonight. Just tell all your lovers
to turn the wicks of their lamps high
so that I may find you, Oh, city,
my city of many lights.

(translated from the Urdu by Agha Shahid Ali)

iatrogenicmyth.livejournal.com

Your sorrow is in search of someone
willing to spill his blood
but they who once lined the roads

ready to give up this life
at a moment's notice

for you

have left
no longer to be found

Beloved
the night waited with me for you
at dawn it admitted defeat and left

my consolers also departed
hurt to find my eyes

without tears

let down that I held back my grief

Nothing's left now
no possibility of the night of love
and no way to show even a glimpse of pain

there's no room for complaints
no margins allowed for suggestions

Tyrant
it's your era

the restless heart's lost its every right

It was me
it was my shirt
that was printed

with blood on the streets
darkened there with inks of accusation

I declared these stains a new fashion
and went to mingle with the guests

at my lover's home

Nowhere anymore
that abandon of passion

no one wears fidelity's raw fabrics

Hangman
what will you do with that rope?

who's asked you to build the scaffold?

those once proud to be accused of love
they all have vanished

(trans. by agha shahid ali)

fleaux.livejournal.com

Ghazal
By Agha Shahid Ali

What will suffice for a true-love knot? Even the rain?
But he has bought grief's lottery, bought even the rain.

"our glosses / wanting in this world" "Can you remember?"
Anyone! "when we thought / the poets taught" even the rain?

After we died--That was it!--God left us in the dark.
And as we forgot the dark, we forgot even the rain.

Drought was over. Where was I? Drinks were on the house.
For mixers, my love, you'd poured--what?--even the rain.

Of this pear-shaped orange's perfumed twist, I will say:
Extract Vermouth from the bergamot, even the rain.

How did the Enemy love you--with earth? air? and fire?
He held just one thing back till he got even: the rain.

This is God's site for a new house of executions?
You swear by the Bible, Despot, even the rain?

After the bones--those flowers--this was found in the urn:
The lost river, ashes from the ghat, even the rain.

What was I to prophesy if not the end of the world?
A salt pillar for the lonely lot, even the rain.

How the air raged, desperate, streaming the earth with flames--
to help burn down my house, Fire sought even the rain.

He would raze the mountains, he would level the waves,
he would, to smooth his epic plot, even the rain.

New York belongs at daybreak to only me, just me--
to make this claim Memory's brought even the rain.

They've found the knife that killed you, but whose prints are these?
No one has such small hands, Shahid, not even the rain.

-

Does anyone have good ghazal recommendations?

justspies.livejournal.com

SNOW ON THE DESERT
Agha Shahid Ali

“Each ray of sunshine is seven minutes old,”
Serge told me in New York one December night.

“So when I look at the sky, I see the past?”
“Yes, Yes," he said. “especially on a clear day.”

On January 19, 1987,
as I very early in the morning
drove my sister to Tucson International,

suddenly on Alvernon and 22nd Street
the sliding doors of the fog were opened,

and the snow, which had fallen all night, now
sun-dazzled, blinded us, the earth whitened

out, as if by cocaine, the desert’s plants,
its mineral-hard colors extinguished,
wine frozen in the veins of the cactus.

* * *

The Desert Smells Like Rain: in it I read:
The syrup from which sacred wine is made

is extracted from the saguaros each
summer. The Papagos place it in jars,

where the last of it softens, then darkens
into a color of blood though it tastes

strangely sweet, almost white, like a dry wine.
As I tell Sameetah this, we are still

seven miles away. “And you know the flowers
of the saguaros bloom only at night?”

We are driving slowly, the road is glass.
“Imagine where we are was a sea once.

Just imagine!” The sky is relentlessly
sapphire, and the past is happening quickly:

the saguaros have opened themselves, stretched
out their arms to rays millions of years old,
( in each ray a secret of the planet’s origin, the rays hurting each cactus )

mercywaits.livejournal.com

and when we -- as if from ashes -- ascend
into the cold where the heart must defend
its wings of terror and even pity
and below us the haze of New Delhi
grays, In your eyes I look for my wounds' deap sea.
But five hundred years waved with history?
It is to song that one must turn for flight,
But with what measure will I shed sunlight
on pain? In you eyes -- was her sari turquoise? --
I look for the deep sea... That is her voice --
Begum Akhtar's. "You were the last, we know,
to see her in Delhi, Desperado
in search of catastrophe." Heartbreak of perfume
is mine again. The pilot turns up the volume:

Attar -- of jasmine? What was it she wore
that late morning in October '74
when we were driven (it was the sunniest
day) from Connaught Place to Palam Airport? She pressed
a note -- Rs. 100 -- into my palm:
"Take it or, on my life, I will perish."
They announced DEPARTURE. I touched her arm.
Her sari was turquiose! She turned to vanish,
but then turned to wave. (My silk is stained,
How will I face my Lord? she'd set in Pain --
her chosen raga that July in Srinagar.)
A week later: GHAZAL QUEEN BEGUM AKHTAR
IS DEAD. She had claimed her right-to-die:
She had sung "Everyone Will Be Here But I"

-- from I Dream I Am the Only Passenger on Flight 423 to Srinagar

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I Eat Poetry

Entries tagged with agha shahid ali

Agha Shahid Ali, 'Beyond The Ash Rains'

Snow on the Desert // Agha Shahid Ali

Notes on the Sea's Existence by Agha Shahid Ali

Agha Shahid Ali - A Footnote to History

Agha Shahid Ali, Leaving Sonora

from: Agha Shahid Ali - Farewell

Agha Shahid Ali, 'Beyond the Ash Rains'

Faiz Ahmed Faiz, 'A Prison Evening'

The Dacca Gauzes -- Agha Shahid Ali

Agha Shahid Ali, from 'Notes on the Sea's Existence'

Agha Shahid Ali, 'Land'

Faiz Ahmed Faiz, 'Don't Ask Me for That Love Again'

Faiz Ahmed Faiz, 'We Who Were Executed'

Agha Shahid Ali, 'Beyond the Ash Rains'

Agha Shahid Ali, 'Postcard from Kashmir'

Faiz Ahmed Faiz, 'City of Lights'

Ghazal // Faid Ahmed Faiz

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Agha Shahid Ali, "Snow On The Desert"

agha shahid ali

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