After Khusro
The winter sun’s dazzling on the paper blinds you
To the words you desire to read.
A poet is only alive as long as his words dance on
The tongues of the adherents.
His words rise from the tomb in which he sleeps, Shining moets moving in widening Circles of arrivals and departures, and the steady fire Of longing. Someone must
Remember these words there, where night has already Fallen as you had in love. In this country of sparsities, short days, and the whiteness Of paper, your tears falling
Into the morning air are merely petitions to the Presences Who are sung and unsung into Being at the corners of streets, the rose-watered tombs, And the underground tunnels
Where simple minded folk leave requests to the djinns for Those they lost. You too write: “Take me again, mad Khusro, to that city by the sea where Loving like singing was painless.”
*This scribble in my mind links up with this one.
My Poems
... link (no comments) ... comment
Morning Music
I woke up this morning dreaming something disturbing; it must have been all that red wine, sugar and chocolate I imbibed at the dinner to which I was invited to last evening. While I didn't find myself transformed into a giant beetle, nonethless there is a heaviness in the body and the mind that I am trying to cure with Abida's singing the genius of Khusro's sufiyana*.
* Please leave a comment if you know of a decent biography of Khusro that I can read.
Music Posts
... link (3 comments) ... comment
What the Traveler Perhaps Thinks
The windscreen splinters my face
When I gaze into the night
Contained in these desolate towns
Which might be your eyes.
There was a time when everything There was clear, the blue Of the canals was yet to be obscured By the hyacinth,
Incarnadine like the words with which Our tongues marked us, The “no”s and “don’t”s knotting nooses Around those quick days.
What to do? Neither language with its Ribbed chest enough bread Nor our palms’ prayer at the small Of our backs enough warmth
When every room became a desolation. So when with that unsayble Sentence my mouth betrayed you, my wrists Were already handcuffed to pain.
Now exiled from paradise to this place Where the moon doesn’t cast Its shadow, I rove with thirst, my spine Lanced with an airplane’s needle,
As I keep falling, forever falling Like a meteor through your heart.
* A response-poem to this previous poem.
My Poems
... link (no comments) ... comment