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.
– Agha Shahid Ali
Juvenilia 