Fractals be damned. I have no patience with patterns too large to see. I find I can’t wait for revelations. I want to make sense of it now.
Even as I write, even as I grasp at the air-framed hour-glass of reason I find my faith ebb from me; along with it all my peace.
I look in other directions.
I look then not for answers but for empathy. I look for other times that have known our despair; other hearts that have winced in similar pain. I look perhaps for patterns.
A flicker of despair arrived at a coophole of memory. It revealed what had been well-liked but preserved unowned. Perhaps because only that which is truly known is truly owned. And when I had first come to it-this poem - I had not the resource of empathy to know it by. I leaned out to it today armed with fresh dry grief. I felt a linking of hands and a banding of arms. It was a sudden solace that you, I and Faiz are caught in a pattern that perhaps, is somehow beautiful from up there.
Hum Log
Noor-e-Khursheed se sahme hue, uktaaye hue
Apni tareeki ko bheinche hue liptaaye hue
Wahi besood tajassus, wahi bekar sawaal
Muzmahil saa’at-e-imroz ki berangee se
Yaad-e-maazi se gameen, dehshat-e-farda se niDaal
Tishna-afkaar jo taskeen nahi pathe hain
Sokhta ashq jo aakhon mein nahi aate hai
Ek kada dard jo geet mein Daltaa hi nahin
Dil ke taareek shigaafon se nikalta hi nahin
Aur ek uljhee huee mauhoom si darmaan ki talaash
Dast-e-zindaan ki hawas, chak-e-girebaan ki talaash
Update-
I did this translation of sorts at my mother's request. It is not literal or particularly lyrical but its there for what its worth.
We the people
Extinguished flames that line the corridors of my heart
Frightened, tired by the sun’s incandescence
Like the liquid beauty of a phantom lover
Shrouded, wrapped in an intimate darkness
The same gainless quests, the same useless questions
Depleted by present disenchantments
Grieved by the past, petrified in fear of tomorrow
Thirst-ridden unquenched
Scorched tears that don’t appear
An igneous grief that cannot melt in verse
Or seep from the heart’s lurid cracks
And a mired quest for an illusory panacea
Lust of captive wastelands, a search for madness
2 comments:
Wah.
Wah!
I'm growing up to Faiz, I think. He needs living. It must be universally forbidden to read him before one has substantial fully-lived years under one's belt.
And Shweta, I don't know about literal but lyrical, it is. verrrry nice. An igneous grief, is it?
Yes, yes I think so too. Not the growing into yourself that is adolescence but a growing into the world that is adulthood.
For all his impassioned words that reek of youthful angst, his is an old tired grief.
You liked the usage, huh? I was very happy when I found the word too.
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