Ali, Agha Shahid (1949-2001); Donald Hall (intro);
The veiled suite: the collected poems
W.W. Norton 2009 / Penguin India 2010, 393 pages
ISBN 0393068048, 9780393068047
topics: | poetry | india | english
Agha came to me first through his superb translations of Faiz. His own poems arrived later, floating on anthologies like AK Mehrotra's Twelve Modern Indian Poets or Pritish Nandy's strangertime. compared to faiz, who can be lyrically romantic and fierce with rage - all at the same time, Agha is very toned down, avoiding all kinds of conflict. as a poet, Agha is unequivovally romantic, singing of loss and longing, the sadness of dawn after the song has ended, and the chandeliers go dim. his poetry belongs to the lover; in the words of Mehrotra: Ali's poems seem to be whispered to himself, and to read them is as if to overhear. Shahid's poetry wafts in the ghazal, flows on the jhelum of srinagar under the zero bridge and onto the Dal, recites Ghalib in the bylanes of old delhi. His entire presence is imbued with an Indian-ness that transcends political divides. He finds no use for the poetry of protest, for the raised voice. Living in such troubled times, he finds arguments futile. At one point he talks to Amitabh Ghosh about the divisive forces in the subcontinent: Suddenly he broke off and reached for my hand. “I wish all this had not happened,” he said. “This dividing of the country, the divisions between people – Hindu, Muslim, Muslim, Hindu – you can’t imagine how much I hate it. It makes me sick. What I say is: why can’t you be happy with the cuisines and the clothes and the music and all these wonderful things?” He paused and added softly, “At least here we have been able to make a space where we can all come together because of the good things.” - from "The Ghat Of The Only World", http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?216239 These forces he brings to his poetry as well - the sensibility is as much the Urdu of Faiz as the English of James Merrill: it can be said that no other Indian poet writing in English came close to attempting what was Shahid's great achievement - the elaboration of a poetic voice that was representative of the subcontinent's own mixed history. - Amitava Kumar, little india this is a lovingly edited volume, and it definitely belongs on any poetry lover's shelf. my only carp would be that while this book is titled "collected poems", and claims to "collect the life's work" of Agha, it misses his earliest work, published in India, the volumes Bone Sculptures (1972) and In memory of Begum Akhtar (1979). Though many of these poems were re-published in later volumes (some with considerable re-work - see butcher below), i find many of them - e.g. learning Urdu, or Taxidermist - quite powerful. They deserve their own space. To read some of these early poems, see our page on strangertime. *** Incidentally, I am seriously searching for these two volumes - if any kind soul has a copy they can loan or share, i would be happy to hear from you!!
[...] Make me now your veil then see if you can veil yourself from me. Where is he not from? Which vale of tears? Am I awake? There is little sense of whether I am his - or he is my - veil. For, after the night is fog, who'll unveil whom? Either he knows he is one with the night or is unaware he's an agent of night – nothing else is possible (who is whose veil?) when he, random assassin sent by the sea, is putting, and with no sense of urgency, the final touches on – whose last fantasy? Where isn't he from? He's brought sky from Vail, Colorado, and the Ganges from Varanasi in a clay urn (his heart measures like the sea). He's brought the desert too. It's deep in his eyes when he says: "I want you to be mine alone, see." What hasn't he planned? For music Debussy, then a song from New Orleans in the Crescent's time nearing Penn Station. What's of the essence? Not time, not time, no, not time. I can foresee he will lead each night from night into night. I ask, "Can you promise me this much tonight: that when you divide what remains of this night it will be like a prophet once parted the sea. But no one must die! For however this night has been summoned, I, your mortal every night, must become your veil… and I must lift your veil when just one thing's left to consider: the night." What arrangements haven’t you made for tonight! I am to hand you a knife from behind the veil now rising quickly from your just-lit incense. I'm still alive, alive to learn from your eyes that I am become your veil and I am all you see. for Patricia O’Neill Agha started a collaboration with artist izhar patkin in 1999, just before his cancer was detected. Izhar paints on transparent curtains (veils), and the poem, "Veiled Suite", Agha's last poem, was written for this collaborative project.
Kashmir shrinks into my mailbox, my home a near four by six inches. I always loved neatness. Now I hold the half-inch Himalayas in my hand. This is home. And this is the closest I'll ever be to home. When I return, the colors wn'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, in it a giant negative, black and white, still undeveloped.
I am not born it is 1948 and the bus turns onto a road without name There on his bicycle my father He is younger than I At Okhla where I get off I pass my parents strolling by the Jamuna River My mother is a recent bride her sari a blaze of brocade Silverdust parts her hair She doesn’t see me The bells of her anklets are distant like the sound of china from teashop being lit up with lanterns And the stars are coming out ringing with tongues of glass They go into the house Always faded in photographs In the family album but lit up now with the oil lamp I saw broken in the attic. I want to tell them I am their son older, much older than they are I knock, keep knocking but for them the night is quiet this the night of my being they don’t they won’t hear me they won’t hear my knocking drowning out the tongues of stars.
You can gain an insight into Shahid's poetic process by comparing the
original (left) and how it is converted into a more nuanced episode.
In the new version on the right, appearing in HiH and now in VS, the
butcher seems more cultured, earlier the exchange of Ghalib phrases
was muted, now a new poet (Mir) is added, and they are filling in
each other's lines. However, the butcher's trade was more raw in the
original, as in "the warm january morning hanging on an iron hook".
I am sure Shahid wrestled with this omission, deciding in the end
that it didn't go with the subtle mood of the new complex.
--earlier version ?1975-- --edited--
Urdu, bloody at his lips In this lane
and fingertips, in this near Jama Masjid,
soiled lane of Jama Masjid,
where he wraps kilos of meat
is still fine, polished in sheets of paper.
smooth by the generations.
the ink of the news
He doesn’t smile but stains his knuckles.
accepts my money
with a rare delicacy the script is wet
in his palms: Urdu.
as he hacks the rib of History.
His courtesy grazes bloody at his fingertips,
is still fine on his lips,
my well-fed skin
the language polished smooth
(he hangs this warm January morning by knives
on the iron hook of prayer).
on knives. He hacks
We establish the bond of phrases, the festival goats,
dressed in the couplets of Ghalib.
throws their skin to dogs.
His life is this moment, I smile and quote
a century’s careful image.
a Ghalib line; he completes
the couplet, smiles,
quotes a Mir line. I complete
the couplet.
He wraps my kilo of ribs
I give him the money. The change
clutters on our moment of courtesy
our phrases snapping in mid-syllable.
Ghalib's ghazal's left unrhymed.
Those intervals between the day’s five calls to prayer the women of the house pulling thick threads through vegetables rosaries of ginger of rustling peppers in autumn drying for winter in those intervals this rug part of Grandma’s dowry folded so the Devil’s shadow would not desecrate Mecca scarlet-woven with minarets of gold but then the sunset call to prayer the servants their straw mats unrolled praying or in the garden in summer on grass the children wanting the prayers to end the women’s foreheads touching Abraham’s silk stone of sacrifice black stone descended from Heaven the pilgrims in white circling it this year my grandmother also a pilgrim in Mecca she weeps as the stone is unveiled she weeps holding on to the pillars (for Begum Zafar Ali)
(d. 30 October 1974) 1 Your death in every paper, boxed in the black and white of photographs, obituaries, the sky warm, blue, ordinary, no hint of calamity, no room for sobs, even between the lines. I wish to talk of the end of the world. 2 Do your fingers still scale the hungry Bhairavi, or simply the muddy shroud? Ghazal, that death-sustaining widow, sobs in dingy archives, hooked to you. She wears her grief, a moon-soaked white, corners the sky into disbelief. You've finally polished catastrophe, the note you seasoned with decades of Ghalib, Mir, Faiz: I innovate on a note-less raga. 3 Exiling you to cold mud, your coffin, stupid and white, astounds by its ignorance. It wears its blank pride, defleshing the nomad's echo. I follow you to the earth's claw, shouldering time's shadow. This is history's bitter arrogance, this moment of the bone's freedom. 4 One cannot cross-examine the dead, but I've taken the circumstantial evidence, your records, pictures, tapes, and offered a careless testimony. I wish to summon you in defence, but the grave's damp and cold, now when Malhar longs to stitch the rain, wrap you in its notes: you elude completely. The rain doesn't speak, and life, once again, closes in, reasserting this earth where the air meets in a season of grief. (for Saleem Kidwai)
The dark scissors of his legs cut the moon’s raw silk, highways of wind torn into lanes, his feet pushing down the shadow whose patterns he becomes while trucks, one by one, pass him by, headlights pouring from his pace, his eyes cracked as the Hudson wraps street lamps in its rippled blue shells, the summer’s thin, thin veins bursting with dawn, he, now suddenly free, from the air, from himself, his heart beating far, far behind him
When on Route 80 in Ohio I came across an exit to Calcutta the temptation to write a poem led me past the exit so I could say India always exists off the turnpikes of America so I could say I did take the exit and crossed Howrah and even mention the Ganges as it continued its sobbing under the bridge so when i paid my toll i saw trains rush by one after one on their roofs old passengers each ready to surrender his bones for tickets so that i heard the sun's percussion on tamarind leaves heard the empty cans of children filling only with the shadows of leaves that behind the unloading trucks were the voices of vendors bargaining over women so when the trees let down their tresses the monsoon oiled and braided them and when the wind again parted them this was the temptation to end the poem this way: the warm rains have left many dead on the pavements the signs to route 80 all have disappeared and now the road is a river polished silver by cars the cars are urns carrying ashes to the sea
on the wall the dense ivy of executions
—Zbigniew Herbert
by Agha Shahid Ali
We shall meet again, in Srinagar,
by the gates of the Villa of Peace,
our hands blossoming into fists
till the soldiers return the keys
and disappear. Again we’ll enter
our last world, the first that vanished
in our absence from the broken city.
We’ll tear our shirts for tourniquets
and bind the open thorns, warm the ivy
into roses. Quick, by the pomegranate—
the bird will say—Humankind can bear
everything. No need to stop the ear
to stories rumored in branches: We’ll hear
our gardener’s voice, the way we did
as children, clear under trees he’d planted:
“It’s true, my death, at the mosque entrance,
in the massacre, when the Call to Prayer
opened the floodgates”—Quick, follow the silence—
“and dawn rushed into everyone’s eyes.”
Will we follow the horned lark, pry
open the back gate into the poplar groves,
go past the search post into the cemetery,
the dust still uneasy on hurried graves
with no names, like all new ones in the city?
“It’s true” (we’ll hear our gardener
again). “That bird is silent all winter.
Its voice returns in spring, a plaintive cry.
That’s when it saw the mountain falcon
rip open, in mid-air, the blue magpie,
then carry it, limp from the talons.”
Pluck the blood: My words will echo thus
at sunset, by the ivy, but to what purpose?
In the drawer of the cedar stand,
white in the verandah, we’ll find letters:
When the post offices died, the mailman
knew we’d return to answer them. Better
if he’d let them speed to death,
blacked out by Autumn’s Press Trust
not like this, taking away our breath,
holding it with love’s anonymous
scripts: “See how your world has cracked.
Why aren’t you here? Where are you? Come back.
Is history deaf there, across the oceans?”
Quick, the bird will say. And we’ll try
the keys, with the first one open the door
into the drawing room. Mirror after mirror,
textiled by dust, will blind us to our return
as we light oil lamps. The glass map of our country,
still on the wall, will tear us to lace—
We’ll go past our ancestors, up the staircase,
holding their wills against our hearts. Their wish
was we return—forever!—and inherit(Quick, the bird
will say) that to which we belong, not like this—
to get news of our death after the world’s.
(for Suvir Kaul)
we all---Save the couple!---returned to pain, some in Massachusetts, some in Kashmir where, wet by turns, Order's dry campaign had glued petals with bullets to each pane--- Sarajevo Roses! A gift to glass, that city's name. What else breaks? A lover's pain! But happiness? Must it, too, bring pain? Question I may ask because of a night --- by ice-sculptures, all my words sylvanite under one gaze that filled my glass with pain. That thirst haunts as does the fevered dancing, flames dying among orchids flown in from Sing- apore! Sing then, not of the promising but the Promised End. Of what final pain, what image of that horror can I sing? To be forgotten the most menacing! Those "Houseboat Days in the Vale of Kashmir," for instance, in '29: Did they sing just of love then, or was love witnessing its departure for other thirsts--- the glass of Dal Lake ruffled half by "Satin Glass," that chandeliered boat barely focusing on emptiness--- last half of any night? In Lahore the chanteuse crooned "Stop the Night"--- the groom's request--after the banquet. Night, that Empress, is here, your bride. She will sing! Her limbs break like chrysanthemums. O Night, what hints have been passed in the sky tonight? The stars so quiet, what galaxies of pain leave them unable to prophesy this night? With a rending encore, she closed the night. There was, like this, long ago in Kashmir, a moment --- after a concert --- outside Kashmir Book Shop that left me stranded, by midnight, in a hotel mirror. Would someone glass me in ---from what? Filled, I emptied my glass, lured by a stranger's eyes into their glass. There, nothing melted, as in Lahore's night: Heat had brought sweat to the lip of my glass but sculptures kept iced their aberrant glass. To be forgotten my most menacing image of the End --- expelled from the glass of someone's eyes as if no full-length glass had held us, safe, from political storms? Pain, then, becomes love's thirst--- the ultimate pain to lose a stranger! O, to have said, glass in hand, "Where Thou art---that---is Home---/Cashmere--- or Calvary---the same"! In the Casmir and Poison and Brut air, my rare Cashmere thrown off, the stranger knew my arms are glass, that banished from Eden (on earth: Kashmir) into the care of storms (it rains in Kashmir, in Lahore, and here in Amherst tonight), in each new body I would drown Kashmir. A brigadier says, The boys of Kashmir break so quickly, we make their bodies sing, on the rack, till no song is left to sing. "Butterflies pause/On their passage Cashmere---" And happiness: must it only bring pain? The century is ending. It is pain from which love departs into all new pain: Freedom's terrible thirst, flooding Kashmir, is bringing love to its tomented glass. Stranger, who will inherit the last night of the past? Of what shall I not sing, and sing? (for Shafaq Husain)
Are you carrying anything that could
be dangerous for the other passengers?
O just my heart first terrorist
(a flame dies by dawn in every shade)
Crescent-lit it fits the profile
on your screen
Damascene-green
in blood’s mansions (candle that burned
till its flame died in blue corridors)
it’s relit each time it tries to exit
this body for another’s in another century
(Andalusia was but to be missed)
Last week I went to the Pyrenees
and then came here for the year’s farewell
to your city
In your custom of countdowns
as the gongs were struck I gulped each grape
(the heart skipped its beats wildly):
Ten . . . Seven the Year whirled in
to castanets to strings DRUMS Two
DRUMS ONE! DRUMS Champagne!
So what white will the heart wear
till the soul is its own blood-filled crystal
ruby refuge for a fugitive angel?
His wings waxed silver to track the Atlantic
he won’t –- like any body -– let
the soul go So delete my emerald beats
(in each color all night a candle burns)
Hit ENTER the Mediterranean
this minute is uncut sapphire
And your Catalan sky? Behold how to hide
one must . . . like God spend all one’s blue.
(for Rafiq Kathwari)
About this poem, Amitav Ghosh has written:
Shahid was himself no mean practioner of repartee. On one famous
occasion, at Barcelona airport, he was stopped by a security guard just
as he was about to board a plane. The guard, a woman, asked: “What do
you do?”
“I'm a poet”, Shahid answered.
“What were you doing in Spain?”
“Writing poetry.”
No matter what the question, Shahid worked poetry into his
answer. Finally, the exasperated woman asked: “Are you carrying
anything that could be dangerous to the other passengers?”At this
Shahid clapped a hand to his chest and cried: “Only my heart.”
This was one of his great Wildean moments...
from "The Ghat Of The Only World", http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?216239
Feel the patient’s heart Pounding—oh please, this once— —James Merrill I'll do what I must if I'm bold in real time. A refugee, I'll be paroled in real time. Cool evidence clawed off like shirts of hell-fire? A former existence untold in real time ... The one you would choose: Were you led then by him? What longing, O Yaar, is controlled in real time? Each syllable sucked under waves of our earth— The funeral love comes to hold in real time! They left him alive so that he could be lonely— The god of small things is not consoled in real time. Please afterwards empty my pockets of keys— It’s hell in the city of gold in real time. God’s angels again are—for Satan!—forlorn. Salvation was bought but sin sold in real time. And who is the terrorist, who the victim? We’ll know if the country is polled in real time. “Behind a door marked DANGER” are being unwound the prayers my friend had enscrolled in real time. The throat of the rearview and sliding down it the Street of Farewell’s now unrolled in real time. I heard the incessant dissolving of silk— I felt my heart growing so old in real time. Her heart must be ash where her body lies burned. What hope lets your hands rake the cold in real time? Now Friend, the Belovèd has stolen your words— Read slowly: The plot will unfold in real time. (for Daniel Hall) [Yaar: Hindi for friend]
"Where should we go after the last frontiers, where should the birds fly after the last sky?" -- Mahmoud Darwish In Jerusalem a dead phone's dialed by exiles. You learn your strange fate: you were exiled by exiles. You open the heart to list unborn galaxies. Don't shut that folder when Earth is filed by exiles. Before Night passes over the wheat of Egypt, let stones be leavened, the bread torn wild by exiles. Crucified Mansoor was alone with the Alone: God's loneliness -- just His -- compiled by exiles. By the Hudson lies Kashmir, brought from Palestine -- It shawls the piano, Bach beguiled by exiles. Tell me who's tonight the Physician of Sick Pearls? Only you as you sit, Desert child, by exiles. Match Majnoon (he kneels to pray on a wine-stained rug) or prayer will be nothing, distempered mild by exiles. "Even things that are true can be proved." Even they? Swear not by Art but, dear Oscar Wilde, by exiles. Don't weep, we'll drown out the Calls to Prayer, O Saqi -- I'll raise my glass before wine is defiled by exiles. Was -- after the last sky -- this the fashion of fire: autumn's mist pressed to ashes styled by exiles? If my enemy's alone and his arms are empty, give him my heart silk-wrapped like a child by exiles. Will you, Beloved Stranger, ever witness Shahid -- two destinies at last reconciled by exiles? Mansoor: Mansoor al-Hallaj, a great mystic who was crucified for saying "I am the truth" Majnoon: lit. "possessed" or "mad" - sacrificing everything for love
I On our last evening on this land
On our last evening on this land we chop our days
from our young trees, count the ribs we’ll take with us
and the ribs we’ll leave behind… On the last evening
we bid nothing farewell, nor find the time to end…
Everything remains as it is, it is the place that changes our dreams
and its visitors. Suddenly we’re incapable of irony,
this land will now host atoms of dust… Here, on our last evening,
we look closely at the mountains besieging the clouds: a conquest…
and a counter-conquest,
and an old time handing this new time the keys to our doors.
So enter our houses, conquerors, and drink the wine
of our mellifluous Mouwashah. We are the night at midnight,
and no horseman will bring dawn from the sanctuary of the last Call to
Prayer…
Our tea is green and hot; drink it. Our pistachios are fresh; eat them.
The beds are of green cedar, fall on them,
following this long siege, lie down on the feathers of
our dreams. The sheets are crisp, perfumes are ready by the door, and there are plenty of mirrors:
enter them so we may exit completely. Soon we will search
in the margins of your history, in distant countries,
for what was once our history. And in the end we will ask ourselves:
Was Andalusia here or there? On the land…or in the poem?
Mouwashah: characteristic form of Andalusian poetry, recited and
sung. Still performed through-out the Arab world.
Violins weep with gypsies going to Andalusia
Violins weep for Arabs leaving Andalusia
Violins weep for a time that does not return
Violins weep for a homeland that might return
Violins set fire to the woods of that deep deep darkness
Violins tear the horizon and smell my blood in the vein
Violins weep with gypsies going to Andalusia
Violins weep for Arabs leaving Andalusia
Violins are horses on a phantom string of moaning water
Violins are the ebb and flow of a field of wild lilacs
Violins are monsters touched by the nail of a woman now distant
Violins are an army, building and filling a tomb made of marble
and Nahawund
Violins are the anarchy of hearts driven mad by the wind in a dancer’s foot
Violins are flocks of birds fleeing a torn banner
Violins are complaints of silk creased in the lover’s night
Violins are the distant sound of wine falling on a previous desire
Violins follow me everywhere in vengeance
Violins seek me out to kill me wherever they find me
Violins weep for Arabs leaving Andalusia
Violins weep with gypsies going to Andalusia
* Nahawund: One of the classical Arabic musical modes.
Just a few return from dust, disguised as roses. What hopes the earth forever covers, what faces? I too could recall moonlit roofs, those nights of wine - But Time has shelved them now in Memory's dimmed places She has left forever, let blood flow from my eyes till my eyes are lamps lit for love's darkest places. All is his - Sleep, Peace, Night - when on his arm your hair shines to make him the god whom nothing effaces. With wine, the palm's lines, believe me, rush to Life's stream - Look, here's my hand, and here the red glass it raises. [not in ghalib?] See me! Beaten by sorrow, man is numbed to pain. Grief has become the pain only pain erases. World, should Ghalib keep weeping you will see a flood drown your terraced cities, your marble palaces.
सब कहां कुछ लालह-ओ-गुल में नुमायां हो गईं
ख़ाक में कया सूरतें होंगी कि पिनहां हो गईं
याद थीं हम को भी रनगारनग बज़म-आराइयां
लेकिन अब नक़श-ओ-निगार-ए ताक़-ए निसयां हो गईं
[...]
जू-ए ख़ूं आंखों से बहने दो कि है शाम-ए फ़िराक़
मैं यह समझूंगा कि शम`एं दो फ़ुरोज़ां हो गईं
इन परीज़ादों से लेंगे ख़ुलद में हम इनतिक़ाम
क़ुदरत-ए हक़ से यिही हूरें अगर वां हो गईं
नीनद उस की है दिमाग़ उस का है रातें उस की हैं
तेरी ज़ुलफ़ें जिस के बाज़ू पर परेशां हो गईं
मैं चमन में कया गया गोया दबिसतां खुल गया
बुलबुलें सुन कर मिरे नाले ग़ज़ल-ख़वां हो गईं
वह निगाहें कयूं हुई जाती हैं या रब दिल के पार
जो मिरी कोताही-ए क़िसमत से मिज़हगां हो गईं
बसकि रोका मैं ने और सीने में उभरीं पै ब पै
मेरी आहें बख़यह-ए चाक-ए गरेबां हो गईं
वां गया भी मैं तो उन की गालियों का कया जवाब
याद थीं जितनी दु`आएं सरफ़-ए दरबां हो गईं
जां-फ़िज़ा है बादह जिस के हाथ में जाम आ गया
सब लकीरें हाथ की गोया रग-ए जां हो गईं
हम मुवहहिद हैं हमारा केश है तरक-ए रुसूम
मिललतें जब मिट गईं अजज़ा-ए ईमां हो गईं
रनज से ख़ू-गर हुआ इनसां तो मिट जाता है रनज
मुशकिलें मुझ पर पड़ीं इतनी कि आसां हो गईं
यूं ही गर रोता रहा ग़ालिब तो अय अहल-ए जहां
देखना इन बसतियों को तुम कि वीरां हो गईं
At dawn you leave. The river wears its skin of light And I trace love's loss to the origin of light. "I swallow down goodbyes I won't get to use." At grief's speed she waves from a palanquin of light. My book's been burned? Send me the ashes, so I can say: I've been sent the phoenix in a coffin of light. From history tears learn a slanted understanding of the human face torn by blood's bulletin of light. It was a temporal thought. Well, it has vanished. Will Prometheus commit the mortal sin of light? She said, "My name is icicles coming down from it ... " Did I leave it, somewhere, in a margin of light? When I go off alone, as if listening for God, there's absolutely nothing I can win of light. Now everything's left to the imagination -- a djinn has deprived even Aladdin of light. We’ll see Manhattan, a bride in diamonds, one day Abashed to remind her sweet man, Brooklyn, of light.
A language of loss? I have some business in Arabic. Love letters: a calligraphy pitiless in Arabic. At an exhibit of miniatures, what Kashmiri hairs! Each paisley inked into a golden tress in Arabic. This much fuss about a language I don't know? So one day perfume from a dress may let you digress in Arabic. A "Guide for the Perplexed" was written–believe me– by Cordoba's Jew–Maimonides–in Arabic. Majnoon, by stopped caravans, rips his collars, cries "Laila!" Pain translated is O! much more–not less–in Arabic. Writes Shammas: Memory, no longer confused, now is a homeland– his two languages a Hebrew caress in Arabic. When Lorca died, they left the balconies open and saw: On the sea his qasidas stitched seamless in Arabic. Ah, bisexual Heaven: wide-eyed houris and immortal youths! To your each desire the say Yes! O Yes! in Arabic. For that excess of sibilance, the last Apocalypse, so pressing those three forms of S in Arabic. I too, O Amichai, saw everything, just like you did– In Death. In Hebrew. And (please let me stress) in Arabic. They ask me to tell them what Shahid means: Listen, listen: It means "The Beloved" in Persian, "witness" in Arabic.
Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar
—Laurence Hope
Where are you now? Who lies beneath your spell tonight?
Whom else from rapture’s road will you expel tonight?
Those “Fabrics of Cashmere—” “to make Me beautiful—”
“Trinket” — to gem — “Me to adorn — How tell” — tonight?
I beg for haven: Prisons, let open your gates —
A refugee from Belief seeks a cell tonight.
God’s vintage loneliness has turned to vinegar —
All the archangels — their wings frozen — fell tonight.
Lord, cried out the idols, Don’t let us be broken;
Only we can convert the infidel tonight.
Mughal ceilings, let your mirrored convexities
multiply me at once under your spell tonight.
He’s freed some fire from ice in pity for Heaven.
He’s left open — for God — the doors of Hell tonight.
In the heart’s veined temple, all statues have been smashed.
No priest in saffron’s left to toll its knell tonight.
God, limit these punishments, there’s still Judgment Day—
I'm a mere sinner, I'm no infidel tonight.
Executioners near the woman at the window.
Damn you, Elijah, I'll bless Jezebel tonight.
The hunt is over, and I hear the Call to Prayer
fade into that of the wounded gazelle tonight.
My rivals for your love — you’ve invited them all?
This is mere insult, this is no farewell tonight.
And I, Shahid, only am escaped to tell thee—
God sobs in my arms. Call me Ishmael tonight.
Foreword 15 The Veiled Suite 23
Postcard from Kashmir 29 A Lost Memory of Delhi 30 A Dream of Glass Bangles 32 Snowmen 34 Cracked Portraits 35 Story of a Silence 38 Prayer Rug 40 The Dacca Gauzes 42 The Season of the Plains 44 A Monsoon Note on Old Age 46 A Butcher 47 The Fate of the Astrologer Sitting on the Pavement Outside 49 the Delhi Railway Station After Seeing Kozintsev's King Lear in Delhi 50 Chandni Chowk, Delhi 51 Cremation 52 In Memory of Begum Akhtar 53 Homage to Faiz Ahmed Faiz 56 A Wrong Turn 60 Vacating an Apartment 61 The Previous Occupant 63 Leaving Your City 65 Philadelphia, 2:00 A.M. 67 The Jogger on Riverside Drive, 5:00 A.M. 68 Flight from Houston in January 69 Stationery 71 Survivor 72 I Dream it is afternoon when i return to Delhi 74 A Call 76 The Tiger at 4:00 A.M. 77 In the Mountains 79 Houses 81
Bell Telephone Hours 85
Has anyone heard from you lately? 85
Call long distance: the next best thing to being there 86
It's getting late. Do your friends know where you are? 87
Reach out and touch someone far away. 88
Use your phone for all it's worth Today, talk
is cheap. Call somebody 89
Advertisement (Found Poem) 90
Language Games 92
Poets on Bathroom Walls 95
Christmas, 1980s 96
An Interview with Red Riding Hood, Now No Longer Little 98
The Wolf's Postscript to "Little Red Riding Hood" 100
Hansel's Game 102
Eurydice 107
Beyond the Ash Rains 110
A Rehearsal of Loss 112
Crucifixion 113
Leaving Sonora 116
I Dream I Return to Tucson in the Monsoons 117
A Nostalgist's Map of America 118
In Search of Evanescence 121
Students of mist 121
It was a year of brilliant water 121
When on Route 80 in Ohio 123
Someone wants me to live 125
From the Faraway Nearby--- 127
In Pennsylvania seven years ago 128
We must always have a place 129
You 130
The way she had -- in her rushes-- of resonance--- 131
Shahid, you never 133
``Phil was afraid of being forgotten.'' 135
The Keeper of the Dead Hotel 136
From Another Desert 139
Cries Majnoon: 139
In the grief of broken stone 140
Each statue will be broken 141
There again is memory 141
Cries Majnoon: 142
His blood shines 143
Who now weeps 144
Majnoon was again sighted 145
Majnoon 145
In prison Majnoon weeps for Satan: 147
The prisoners know they've been 148
Ambushed in century after century by 148
the police of God
The dead are here. Listen to survivors 149
No 151
Resume 152
Notes on the Sea's Existence 154
Medusa 156
The Youngest of the Graeae 158
Desert Landscape 160
I See Chile in My Rearview Mirror 161
Snow on the Desert 164
[in this long poem, the lines that stand out are from
leftbehind times]
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…
The Blessed Word: A Prologue 171 Farewell 175 At a certain point I lost track of you. You needed me. You needed to perfect me: In your absence you polished me into the Enemy. Your history gets in the way of my memory. I am everything you lost. Your perfect enemy. Your memory gets in the way of my memory… There is nothing to forgive. You won’t forgive me. I hid my pain even from myself’; I revealed my pain only to myself. There is everything to forgive. You can’t forgive me. If only somehow you could have been mine, what would not have been possible in the world? [...] I See Kashmir from New Delhi at Midnight 178 The Last Saffron 181 I Dream I Am the Only Passenger on Flight 423 to Srinagar 184 "Some Vision of the World Cashmere" 188 "Lo, A Tint Cashmere! / Lo, A Rose" 190 Ghazal 193 Dear Shahid 194 A Pastoral 196 Return to Harmony 3 199 The Country Without a Post Office 202 The Floating Post Office 207 The Correspondent 209 A Fate's Brief Memoir 211 At the Museum 217 A History of Paisley 218 A Footnote to History 221 Son et Lumiere at Shalimar Garden 223 Ghazal 225 First Day of Spring 227 Ghazal 228 Death Row 229 The City of Daughters 230 Muharram in Srinagar, 1992 234 Hans Christian Ostro 236 A Villanelle 238 After the August Wedding in Lahore, Pakistan 239
Lenox Hill 247
From Amherst to Kashmir 250
Karbala: A History of the ``House of Sorrow'' 250
Zainab's Lament in Damascus 253
Summers of Translation 255
Above the Cities 259
Memory 263
New Delhi Airport 264
Film Bhajan Found on a 78 RPM 266
Srinagar Airport 267
God 269
Ghalib's Ghazal 270
The Fourth Day 272
By the Waters of the Sind 276
Rooms Are Never Finished 279
Ghazal 282
Barcelona Airport 284
A Secular Comedy 286
Heaven 286
Earth 287
Hell 288
The Nature of Temporal Order 291
Ghazal (I'll do what I must if I'm bold in real time) 293
On Hearing a Lover Not Seen for Twenty 295
Years Has Attempted Suicide
Suicide Note 296
Ghazal (by exiles) 297
The Purse-Seiner Atlantis 299
Eleven Stars Over Andalusia 301
by Mahmoud Darwish; tran. Agha Shahid Ali w Ahmed Dallal
On our last evening on this land 301
How can I write above the clouds? 302
There is a sky beyond the sky for me 303
I am one of the kings of the end 304
One day I will sit on the pavement 305
Truth has two faces and the snow is black 306
Who am I after the night of the estranged? 307
O water, be a string to my guitar 308
In the exodus I love you more 309
I want from love only the beginning 310
Violins 311
I Dream I Am at the Ghat of the Only World 313
A night of ghazals comes to an end. The singer
departs through her chosen mirror, her one diamond
cut on her countless necks. I, as ever, linger
till chandeliers dim to the blue of Samarkhand
domes and I've again lost everyone. Which mirror
opened for JM's descent to the skeletoned
dark? Will I know the waiting boat?
[...]
I always move in my heart between sad countries.
[Amitabha Ghosh refers to this title:
His apartment was a spacious and airy split-level, on the seventh floor of
a newly-renovated building. There was a cavernous study on the top floor
and a wide terrace that provided a magnificent view of the Manhattan
skyline, across the East River. Shahid loved this view of the Brooklyn
waterfront slipping, like a ghat, into the East River, under the glittering
lights of Manhattan.
We’ll see Manhattan, a bride in diamonds, one day
Abashed to remind her sweet man, Brooklyn, of light. ]
(a book of ghazals) I Have Loved 326 For You 327 Of It All 329 Of Fire 331 Things 333 Shines 335 My Word 337 From The Start 339 Angels 341 Of Water 343 As Ever 345 Land 347 Not All, Only A Few Return 349 Water 350 Of Snow 351 Air 352 About Me 353 In Marble 355 Bones 357 In 359 Beyond English 361 Of Light 363 Stars 365 For Time 366 God 368 Forever 369 After You 371 In Arabic 372 Tonight 374 Existed 376 Notes, Biographical Note, Index
from "The Ghat Of The Only World", Outlook magazine I knew Shahid’s work long before I met him. His 1997 Collection, The Country Without a Post Office, had made a powerful impression on me. His voice was like none I had ever heard before, at once lyrical and fiercely disciplined, engaged and yet deeply inward. Not for him, the mock-casual almost-prose of so much contemporary poetry: his was a voice that was not ashamed to speak in a bardic register. I knew of no one else who would even conceive of publishing a line like: ‘Mad heart, be brave.’ Shahid had a sorcerer’s ability to transmute the mundane into the magical. Once I accompanied Iqbal, his brother, and Hena, his sister, on a trip to fetch him home from hospital. This was on May 21st: by that time he had already been through several unsuccessful operations. Now he was back in hospital to undergo a surgical procedure that was intended to relieve the pressure on his brain. His head was shaved and the shape of the tumour was visible upon his bare scalp, its edges outlined by metal sutures. When it was time to leave the ward a blue-uniformed hospital escort arrived with a wheelchair. Shahid waved him away, declaring that he was strong enough to walk out of the hospital on his own. But he was groggier than he had thought and his knees buckled after no more than a few steps. Iqbal went running off to bring back the wheelchair while the rest of us stood in the corridor, holding him upright. At that moment, leaning against the cheerless hospital wall, a kind of rapture descended on Shahid. When the hospital orderly returned with the wheelchair Shahid gave him a beaming smile and asked where he was from. Ecuador, the man said and Shahid clapped his hands gleefully together. “Spanish!” he cried, at the top of his voice. “I always wanted to learn Spanish. Just to read Lorca.” At this the tired, slack-shouldered orderly came suddenly to life. “Lorca? Did you say Lorca?” He quoted a few lines, to Shahid’s great delight. “Ah! ‘La Cinque de la Tarde’,” Shahid cried, rolling the syllables gleefully around his tongue. “How I love those words. ‘La Cinque de la Tarde’!” That was how we made our way through the hospital’s crowded lobby: with Shahid and the orderly in the vanguard, one quoting snatches of Spanish poetry and the other breaking in from time to time with exultant cries of, "La Cinque de la Tarde, La Cinque de la Tarde…” Shahid’s gregariousness had no limit: there was never an evening when there wasn’t a party in his living room. ... against the background of the songs and voices and that were always echoing out of his apartment, even the ringing of the doorbell had an oddly musical sound. Suddenly, Shahid would appear, flinging open the door, releasing a great cloud of heeng into the frosty New York air. The journey from the foyer of Shahid’s building’s to his door was a voyage between continents: on the way up the rich fragrance of rogan josh and haak would invade the dour, grey interior of the elevator; against the background of the songs and voices and that were always echoing out of his apartment, even the ringing of the doorbell had an oddly musical sound. Suddenly, Shahid would appear, flinging open the door, releasing a great cloud of heeng into the frosty New York air. “Oh, how nice,” he would cry, clapping his hands, “how nice that you’ve come to see your little Moslem!” Invariably, there’d be some half-dozen or more people gathered inside – poets, students, writers, relatives – and in the kitchen someone would always be cooking or making tea. Almost to the very end, even as his life was being consumed by his disease, he was the centre of a perpetual carnival, an endless mela of talk, laughter, food and of course, poetry.
No matter how many people there were, Shahid was never so distracted as to lose track of the progress of the evening’s meal. From time to time he would interrupt himself to shout directions to whoever was in the kitchen: “yes, now, add the dahi now.” Even when his eyesight was failing, he could tell, from the smell alone, exactly which stage the rogan josh had reached. And when things went exactly as they should, he would sniff the air and cry out loud: “Ah! Khana ka kya mehek hai!” Shahid was legendary for his prowess in the kitchen, frequently spending days over the planning and preparation of a dinner party. It was through one such party, given while he was in Arizona, that he met James Merrill, the poet who was to radically alter the direction of his poetry. Shahid placed great store on authenticity and exactitude in cooking and would tolerate no deviation from traditional methods and recipes: for those who took short cuts, he had only pity. He had a special passion for the food of his region, one variant of it in particular: ‘Kashmiri food in the Pandit style’. I asked him once why this was so important to him and he explained that it was because of a recurrent dream, in which all the Pandits had vanished from the valley of Kashmir and their food had become extinct. This was a nightmare that haunted him and he returned to it again and again, in his conversation and his poetry.
[Agha's family] were Shia, who are a minority amongst the Muslims of Kashmir. Shahid liked to tell a story about the origins of his family: the line was founded, he used to say, by two brothers who came to Kashmir from Central Asia. The brothers had been trained as hakims, specializing in Yunani medicine, and they arrived in Kashmir with nothing but their knowledge of medical lore: they were so poor that they had to share a single cloak between them. But it so happened that the then Maharajah of Kashmir was suffering from terrible stomach pains, ‘some kind of colic’. Learning that all the kingdom’s doctors had failed to cure the ailing ruler, the two brothers decided to try their hand. They gave the Maharajah a concoction that went through the royal intestines like a plunger through a tube, bringing sudden and explosive relief. Delighted with his cure, the grateful potentate appointed the brothers his court physicians: thus began the family’s prosperity. “So you see,” Shahid would comment, in bringing the story to its conclusion. “My family’s fortunes were founded on a fart.” By Shahid’s account, his great-grandfather was the first Kashmiri Muslim to matriculate. The story went that to sit for the examination, he had had to travel all the way from Srinagar to Rawalpindi in a tonga. Later, he too became an official at the court of the Maharajah of Kashmir. He had special charge of education, and took the initiative to educate his daughter. Shahid’s grandmother was thus one of the first educated women in Kashmir. She passed the matriculation examination, took several other degrees, and in time became the Inspector of Women’s School’s. She could quote poetry in four languages: English, Urdu, Farsi and Kashmiri. Shahid’s father, Agha Ashraf Ali, continued the family tradition of public service in education. He taught at Jamia Millia University in New Delhi and went on to become the principal of the Teacher’s College in Srinagar. In 1961, he enrolled at Ball State Teacher’s College, in Muncie, Indiana, to do a PhD in Comparative Education. Shahid was twelve when the family moved to the US and for the next three years he attended school in Muncie. Later the family moved back to Srinagar and that was where Shahid completed his schooling. But it was because of his early experience, I suspect, that Shahid was able to take America so completely in his stride when he arrived in Pennsylvania as a graduate student.
The steady deterioration of the political situation in Kashmir – the violence and counter-violence - had a powerful effect on him. In time it became one of the central subjects of his work: indeed it could be said that it was in writing of Kashmir that he created his finest work. The irony of this is that Shahid was not by inclination a political poet. I heard him say once: “If you are from a difficult place and that’s all you have to write about then you should stop writing. You have to respect your art, your form – that is just as important as what you write about.” Another time, I was present at Shahid’s apartment when his long-time friend, Patricia O’Neill, showed him a couple of sonnets written by a Victorian poet. The poems were political, trenchant in their criticism of the British Government for its failure to prevent the massacre of the Armenians in Turkey. Shahid glanced at them and tossed them off-handedly aside: “These are terrible poems.” Patricia asked why, and he said: “Look, I already know where I stand on the massacre of the Armenians. Of course I am against it. But this poem tells me nothing of the massacre; it makes nothing of it formally. I might as well just read a news report.”
Although Shahid’s parents lived in Srinagar, they usually spent the winter months in their flat in New Delhi. It was there that his mother had her first seizure in December 1995. The attack was initially misdiagnosed and it was not till the family brought her to New York’s Lenox Hill Hospital, in January 1996, that it was confirmed that she had a malignant brain tumour. Her condition was so serious that she was operated on two days after her arrival. The operation did not have the desired effect and resulted instead in a partial paralysis. At the time Shahid and his younger brother Iqbal were both teaching at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. His sister, Hena, was working on a PhD at the same institution. The siblings decided to move their mother to Amherst and it was there that she died on April 24, 1997. In keeping with her wishes, the family took her body back to Kashmir for burial. This long and traumatic journey forms the subject of a cycle of poems, ‘From Amherst to Kashmir’, that was later included in Shahid’s 2001 collection, Rooms Are Never Finished. During the last phase of his mother’s illness and for several months afterwards, Shahid was unable to write. The dry spell was broken in 1998, with ‘Lenox Hill’, possibly his greatest poem. The poem was a canzone, a form of unusual rigour and difficulty (the poet Anthony Hecht once remarked that Shahid deserved to be in Guiness Book of records for having written three canzones – more than any other poet). In ‘Lenox Hill’, the architectonics of the form creates a soaring superstructure, an immense domed enclosure, like that of the great mosque of Isfahan or the mausoleum of Sayyida Zainab in Cairo: a space that seems all the more vast because of the austerity of its proportions. The rhymes and half-rhymes are the honeycombed arches that thrust the dome towards the heavens, and the metre is the mosaic that holds the whole in place. Within the immensity of this bounded space, every line throws open a window that beams a shaft of light across continents, from Amherst to Kashmir, from the hospital of Lenox Hill to the Pir Panjal Pass. Entombed at the centre of this soaring edifice lies his mother: …Mother, they asked me, So how’s the writing ? I answered My mother is my poem . What did they expect? For no verse sufficed except the promise, fading, of Kashmir and the cries that reached you from the cliffs of Kashmir (across fifteen centuries) in the hospital. Kashmir, she’s dying ! How her breathing drowns out the universe as she sleeps in Amherst. The poem is packed with the devices that he had perfected over a lifetime: rhetorical questions, imperative commands, lines broken or punctuated to create resonant and unresolvable ambiguities. It ends, characteristically, with a turn that is at once disingenous and wrenchingly direct. For compared to my grief for you, what are those of Kashmir, and what (I close the ledger) are the griefs of the universe when I remember you – beyond all accounting – O my mother? For Shahid, the passage of time produced no cushioning from the shock of the loss of his mother: he re-lived it over and over again until the end. Often he would interrupt himself in mid-conversation: “I can’t believe she’s gone; I still can’t believe it.” The week before his death, on waking one morning, he asked his family where his mother was and whether it was true that she was dead. On being told that she was, he wept as though he were living afresh through the event. In the penultimate stanza of ‘Lenox Hill,’ in a breathtaking, heart-stopping inversion, Shahid figures himself as his mother’s mother: “As you sit here by me, you’re just like my mother,” she tells me. I imagine her: a bride in Kashmir, she’s watching at the Regal, her first film with Father. If only I could gather you in my arms, Mother, I'd save you – now my daughter – from God. The universe opens its ledger. I write: How helpless was God’s mother! I remember clearly the evening when Shahid read this poem in the living room of my house. I remember it because I could not keep myself from wondering whether it was possible that Shahid’s identification with his mother was so powerful as to spill beyond the spirit and into the body. Brain cancer is not, so far as I know, a hereditary disease, yet his body had, as it were, elected to reproduce the conditions of his mother’s death. But how could this be possible? Even the thought appears preposterous in the bleak light of the Aristotelian distinction between mind and body, and the notions of cause and effect that flow from it. He had said to me once, “I love to think that I'll meet my mother in the after-life, if there is an after-life.” I had the sense that as the end neared, this was his supreme consolation. He died peacefully, in his sleep, at 2 a.m. on December 8. Amitav Ghosh, Brooklyn December 15, 2001
from author Intro in Twelve Modern Indian Poets [b Delhi 1949, grew up in Srinagar. MA from U. Delhi, where he was teaching befoore leaving for the US in 1976. PhD Penn State 1984, and MFA U. Arizona 1985. Now on the faculty of Hamilton College, NY. ] Poems here are all from Hal-Inch Himalayas, his first mature collection. Previous to it he published Bone-Sculpture (1972), and In memory of Begum Akhtar (1979). Also the author of T.S. Eliot as Editor and _A walk through the yellow pages (1987), a poetry chapbook. The Rebel's Silhouette (1991) consists of poems translated from the Urdu of Faiz Ahmed Faiz. Ali's poems seem to be whispered to himself, and to read them is as if to overhear. ... Though Ali has made exile his permanent condition, it is not what he writes about. Exile offers him unconfined and unpeopled space into which, one at a time, he introduces human figures... The language is always urbane, with individual lines and stanzas seldom calling attention to themselves. If anything, they tend to keep out of sight, making memorability a characteristic of the whole poem - each like a length of Dacca gauze -- rather than its separate parts.
poets.org Poems: Even the Rain I See Chile in My Rearview Mirror The Wolf's Postcript to 'Little Red Riding Hood Translations: You Tell Us What to Do Bangladesh II Before You Came by [all by Faiz Ahmed Faiz] poetry magazine biography + poems : At the Museum Ghazal (I'll do what I must), Land Of Light Prayer Rug