Even the Rain

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

FAREWELL - Agha Shahid Ali Poems

FAREWELL
At a certain point I lost track of you.
They make a desolation and call it peace.
when you left even the stones were buried:
the defenceless would have no weapons.

When the ibex rubs itself against the rocks,

who collects its fallen fleece from the slopes?
O Weaver whose seams perfectly vanished,
who weighs the hairs on the jeweller's balance?
They make a desolation and call it peace.
Who is the guardian tonight of the Gates of Paradise?

My memory is again in the way of your history.

Army convoys all night like desert caravans:
In the smoking oil of dimmed headlights, time dissolved- all
winter- its crushed fennel.
We can't ask them: Are you done with the world?

In the lake the arms of temples and mosques are locked in each other's
reflections.
Have you soaked saffron to pour on them when they are found like this
centuries later in this country
I have stitched to your shadow?

In this country we step out with doors in our arms

Children run out with windows in their arms.
You drag it behind you in lit corridors.
if the switch is pulled you will be torn from everything.

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. You can't forgive me.
I am everything you lost. Your perfect Enemy.
Your memory gets in the way of my memory:

I am being rowed through Paradise in a river of Hell:

Exquisite ghost, it is night.

The paddle is a heart; it breaks the porcelain waves.

It is still night. The paddle is a lotus.
I am rowed- as it withers-toward the breeze which is soft as
if it had pity on me.

If only somehow you could have been mine, what wouldn't

have happened in the world?

I'm everything you lost. You won't forgive me.

My memory keeps getting in the way of your history.
There is nothing to forgive.You can'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?

THE WALLED CITY: 7 POEMS ON DELHI

1
From tomb to tomb,
I chew the ash of prayers.
Won’t poetry happen to me?

Caught in the lanes of history,

don’t I qualify now?

I have even seen Allah in rags

extend the earth like a begging bowl.
 2
The Two-Nation Theory is dead
But the old don’t forget.

In this city of refugees,

trains move like ghosts.
The old don’t forget.

My friend’s grandfather,
hoarder of regrets,
cautions: Those Muslim butchers:
Be careful, they stab you in the back.
I lost my beloved Lahore.

My friend and I are rather simple:

We never saw the continent divide.

3
The streets light up
with the smiles of beggars.
Words fail me,

for I need a harsh language.

But I’m comfortable
like an angry editor.

4
I carry the beggar-woman’s hunger
in my hand

as her eyes follow me to my poems,

follow me into the coffee house
where I’m biting into her,

eating morsels of her night.

5
The bootblack brushes my shoes:
Does my heart beat in my feet?
 His knuckes carry the memory
of this city.
My shoes shine like death

as I wait at the bus stop

for Delhi’s dome of sweat
to break into a monsoon of steel
and rip my Achilles heel.

6
Believe me,
he sat here in this dirt corner
winter and summer, winter, summer.

This morning he wasn’t there

with his ancient beard
and his stretched-out hand.

The sweeper said he took him away

with the morning garbage.

7
A safe distance of smells.
The restaurant airconditioned,
I drink my beer.

Outside the beggars

laze in empty tins,
peeling the sun,
their used beer-can.

Waiter, get me another beer!

AT JAMA MASJID, DELHI

Imagine: Once there was nothing here.

Now look how minarets camouflage the sunset.
Do you hear the call to prayer?
It leaves me unwinding scrolls of legend
till I reach the first brick they brought here.
How the prayers rose, brick by brick?
 Shahjahan knew the depth of stones,
how they turn smooth rubbed on a heart.
And then? Imprisoned
with no consoling ghosts,
bent with old age,
while his cirgin daughter Jahanara
dressed the cracked marble reign
his skin kept up for so long.

QAWWALI AT NIZAMUDDIN AULIA’S DARGAH<

1
Between two saints he shares the earth,
Mohammad Shah Rangeele
(evoked in monsoon khayals).
The beggar woman kisses the marble lattice,
sobs and sobs on Khusro’ pillars.
In a corner Jahanara, garbed in the fakir’s grass,
mumbles a Sufi quatrain.

We recline on the gravestone,

or on the saint’s poem, unaware
of the sorrow of the pulverized prayer.

Time has only its vagrant finger.

Knowing no equal, it pauses for massacres.

2
Suffering has its familiar patterns:

We buy flowers for Nizammudin’s feet,

dream in the corner to the qawwal’s beat.
The saint’s song chokes in his throat.

The poor tie prayers with threads,

accutomed to their ancient wish
for the milk and honey of Paradise.

3
I’ve learnt some lessons the easy way:
 I’ve seen so many, even a child somewhere,
his infant bones hidden forever.

Stone, grass, children turned old:

The dead have no ghosts.

4
These are time’s relics, its suffered epitaphs:

I come here to sing Khusro’s songs.

I burn to the end of the lit essence
as kings and beggars arise in the smoke:

That drunk debauched colourful king

dances again with hoofs of sorrow

as Nadir skins the air with swords,

horses galloping
to the rhythm
of a dying
dynasty.

The muezzin interrupts the dawn, calls

the faithful to prayer with a monster-cry:

We walk through streets calligraphed with blood.

THE JAMA MASJID BUTCHER

Urdu, bloody at his lips

and fingertips, in this
soiled lane of Jama Masjid,

is still fine, polished

smooth by the generations.

He doesn’t smile but

accepts my money
with a rare delicacy
 as he hacks the rib of History.
His courtesy grazes

my well-fed skin

(he hangs this warm January morning

on the iron hook of prayer).

We establish the bond of phrases,

dressed in the couplets of Ghalib.

His life is this moment,

a century’s careful image.

THE EDITOR REVISITED

You still haven’t called me a poet, Dear Sir,

and I’ve been at it,
this business of meanings, sometimes delayed,

selling words in bottles, at times in boxes.

I began with a laugh, stirred my tea with English,

drank India down with a faint British accent,
temples, beggars, and dust
spread like marmalade on my toast:

A bitter taste: On Parliament Street

a policeman beat a child on the head.
Hermaphrodites walked by in Saffron saris,

their drums eching a drought-rhythm.

The Marxists said,

In Delhi English sounds obscene.
Return to Hindi or Bengali, eachword will burn
like hunger.

A language must measure up to one’s native dust.

Divided between two cultures, I spoke a language foreign even to my ears;

I diluted it in a glass of Scotch.
A terrible trade, my lip service to Revolution
punctuated by a whisly-god.

Now collecting a degree in English,

will I embrace my hungry country
with an armful of soliloquies?

This trade in words continues however as

Shakespeare feeds my alienation.

Please note, Dear Sir, my terrible plight

as I collect rejection slips
from your esteemed journal.

KASHMIR WITHOUT A POST OFFICE

. . . letters sent
To dearest him that lives alas! away.
- Gerard Manley Hopkins

Again I’ve returned to this country

where a minaret has been entombed.
Someone soaks the wicks of clay lamps
in mustard oil, each night climbs its steps
to read messages scratched on planets.
His fingerprints cancel blank stamps
in that archive for letters with doomed
addresses, each house buried or empty
 Empty? Because so many fled, ran away,
and became refugees there, in the plains,
where they must now will a final dewfall
to turn the mountains to glass. They’ll see
us through them see us frantically bury
houses to save them from fire that, like a wall,
caves in. The soldiers light it, hone the flames,
burn our world to sudden papier-mâché

inlaid with gold, then ash. When the muezzin

died, the city was robbed of every Call.
The houses were swept about like leaves
for burning. Now every night we bury
our houses and theirs, the ones left empty.
We are faithful. On their doors we hang wreaths.
More faithful each night fire again is a wall
and we look for the dark as it caves in.

We’re inside the fire, looking for the dark,

one unsigned card, left on the street, says. I want
to be he who pours blood. To soak your hands.
Or I’ll leave mine in the cold till the rain
is ink, and my fingers, at the edge of pain,
are seals all night to cancel the stamps.
The mad guide! The lost speak like this. They haunt
a country when it is ash. Phantom heart,

pray he’s alive. I have returned in rain

to find him, to learn why he never wrote.
I’ve brought cash, a currency of paisleys
to buy the new stamps, rare already, blank,
to buy the new stamps, rare already, blank,
no nation named on them. Without a lamp
I look for him in houses buried, empty
He may be alive, opening doors of smoke,
breathing in the dark his ash-refrain:
 Everything is finished, nothing remains.
I must force silence to be a mirror
to see his voice, ask it again for directions.
Fire runs in waves. Should I cross that river?
Each post office is boarded up. Who will deliver
parchment cut in paisleys, my news to prisons?
Only silence can now trace my letters
to him. Or in a dead office the dark panes.