Poet’s Note: Minimalist style relying on precision and powerful evocative imagery
A polyglot, I have traveled extensively in India, Pakistan, Iran, Europe and North America. My poems represent different interconnected themes and cross-cultural tropes touching various chords of human psychology and experience. Growing up in a conflict zone, spending days and months without leaving home, in a state of constant fear and fury, poetry became a medium of expression. Reading in multiple languages, my leading influences come from cross-cultural authors of different periods. These include William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, John Keats, John Donne, Ben Johnson, Madeline Goldstein, and Naomi Shihab Nye in English; Rasul Mir, Ghulam Ahmed Mehjoor, Sočh Krāl and others in Kashmiri; Mirza Ghalib, Mir Taqi Mir, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, and Gulzar in Urdu/Hindi; and Jalāluddin Rumi and Hafez Shirāzi in Persian. Fiddling with a variety of different languages and poetic genres, including satire, I write in Kashmiri (my native language), Urdu/Hindi and English. Particularly inspired by works of Emily Dickinson, Rabindranath Tagore, Uche Nduka, Lal Ded and Rehman Rahi, many of my poems follow a minimalist style relying on precision and use of evocative imagery.
This Is No Dream
Ah, the poverty of the written word!
It does not carry the punctuations
Nor gestures or embellishments
Of a spoken utterance
Listen to the silence!
I went sleepless and troubled
Hiding under my pallid skin
As a thick blanket of darkness
Enveloped the starless night.
This is no dream, my love
For dreams have no anchors —
You have frozen in space
Like a timeless statue,
A figureless corpse
In a remote galaxy.
Do not be disturbed
When I break through
Your protective armors
And quietly slip in.
Untitled
What use is life with no purpose?
Go die in rain!
I see a slice of moon
Glued to the blue canvas
Of a ravaging night
You take a flight
Like a kite in restraint
Your territory penned
By an eternal thread
Fixed to an address
Moaning in agony
We lament our fates
Our false starts
Errors of judgment
O let me carve a wagon
I will take you to paradise
A Self-Evaluation
It was a deep connection
Far-reaching yet undefined —
I wonder what prompted it
There was no history
No prior contact whatsoever
Nothing visibly discernible
Nor physically tangible either —
It tested my resilience
Defeated my sense of platitude
Perseverance —
I cringed
And I crawled
Like an earthly insect
A bird with broken wings
Or a shepherd
Parted from his sheep
Wandering and confused
Aimless —
Perhaps it is time to capitulate
For a calm self-assessment
An evaluation of sorts
To measure the heavenly
Against the mundane —
Nobody Is Going Anywhere
Nobody is going anywhere today
The world has come to a standstill
You stay where you are
I hold on to my ground
And we both keep dreaming —
We keep dreaming
And drawing onto the memories
Of the Past, the Present and the Future --
Memories of the frozen moments
That strike against the translucent curtains
Between our sensory apparatuses.
I keep searching for a potion
Of an undisclosed composition —
O tell me it streams out
From within my own being
And circulates all through
The gossamer reticulations
Of my system
Nourishing my life force
My urge to continue
To be
To move on —
Circles
I have lost my address
I live where I am not found —
Do not look for me
In my envelope
I am on my way to wantonness —
I did not think
Before I set myself
On this journey to nowhere
No wonder I am here
Standing,
Trailing on the way
The long way
That goes in circles —
All poems here, except A Self-Evaluation, are previously unpublished
The essay and the poems are part of our Poetry Special Issue (January 2021), curated by Shireen Quadri and Nawaid Anjum. © The Punch Magazine. No part of this essay or the new poems exclusively featured here should be reproduced anywhere without the prior permission of The Punch Magazine.
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Dear Editor Good Afternoon it was really great to go through the pages of the Punch magazine. I being a student of English Literature liked the poetry part the most especially the poem Circles . it represents us , Kashmiris as over the time we have really lost our address. Let us hope peace prevails in this part of the land. regards showkat shafi Free Lance Media Professional
showkat shafi
Feb 26, 2021 at 03:53