Another evening of separation, don’t ask me now, How she had come and how she had left.

This you see clutched in my hand, is just a heart, A plaything, it can be easily distracted by something else And this, which is standing before you, is just another life That will somehow get lived.

At the gatherings I fill the lamps with oil of memory Of such rapture, of such beauty! For the stricken moon has set somewhere somehow And this night of exile has to be light somehow.

When I had invoked her all my mornings became fragrant, And now when I invoke the pain she gave me, all my nights trash like so many silvers of fish dying on a grassy bank!

Wiping clean the slate of my heart, I thought I could plunge forward But when I begin to tell these lies to myself, those words change without my changing!

And then when did the travelers of the night leave, O Faiz? Where did the breeze disembark and where did the morning go?

Again listening to Abida rip the evening with her haunting voice giving shape to these words of Faiz, written more than 50 years ago in a hospital in Karachi, I couldn't but help to write them along in English.

Here is another version of the same ghazal.