poets-from-pakistan

"There are many Urdu poets and writers in Pakistan, but Amjad Islam Amjad is a famous one as he significantly written several essays, columns but his main focus was poems and poetry. کبھی رقص شام بہار میں اسے دیکھتے"

"Critics have done injustice to poets by labelling them as revolutionary, spiritual, philosophical, psychological or orthodox, Amjad Islam observed. To me there are only two types of poets – good poets and bad ones."

"This is the biggest tragedy, and however much we express our anguish, it does not diminish. If you want to know about the state of the Pakistan-India relationship, you must find out how long it takes for you to get an Indian or a Pakistani visa. If the relationship is good, visas are immediately issued; if not, then it takes days or months. This is the litmus test that people have devised. The visa office is the best barometer. This is absolutely wrong. I think people should meet each other. We have to accept the reality, whether we like it or not. The truth is that there are two separate nations. Personal likes and dislikes are a different thing. If we accept this, then we will be able to proceed. I am an eternal optimist. I feel — and it is my conviction — that because of people-to-people contacts and because of international pressure we will be forced to draw closer."

"No night passes when my sorrow-stricken heart does not bleed, No day I spend that does not completely divest me of honour, Never in my life did I drink a draught of water in peace, Which did not irrigate the dry earth through the channels of my eyes."

"I am all afire I am pain all over. I twist my hands in despair, For I find not my Love. Annoyed art Thou with me, But' tis my own fault, I perceived not the Truth of Thee; I have wasted away my youth, And now can only regret and repent. Rise, O Farid, do your ablutions, Say your morning prayers. The head that bows not to the Lord Should be cut apart from the trunk."

"Farid, time was when these frail thighs scoured over desert and hill; Now, feeble with age even the prayer-jug looks as though lying miles away."

"Lord, give it not to me to Supplicate favours at another's door; Should such be Thy will, Take then life from this body."

"I fear not the passing of youth if the Beloved desert me not; Youth withers and loses bloom without the sustenance of Love... Saith Farid: Sugar and candy, Sweets and honey, rich milk– All these Lord, are sweet; but nothing to Try devotees so sweet as Thou."

"We shall carry on our campaign against this "Zulm" (cruelty)."

"It requires worth fully to appreciate a man of worth."

"Everyone has to follow the road (to death)!"

"I have done nothing but my duty, and which I shall be doing so long as there is life in me."

"I hope you must be enjoying to receive a letter from me. I may tell you that I enjoy to receive your letter ten times more. In prison life, a letter from dear ones is a great luxury."

"In the Jail, there is a Government supplied radio, and I hear music and news occasionally. My time, however, passes in my pastime; I live by myself, alone."

"All of you please avoid smoking, drinking habits as venomous things. By keeping away from them you will be happy and healthy."

"Time never returns once lost."

"There is only one person that can be "more than a father", it is your dear mother, whose love for her offspring is unbounded by heaven and earth."

"On that side stands Hafiz Ibrahim, here stands Abdus Samih On that side is Hardwari learning, here we have Shari’i training On that side lies submission to Gandhi, here stands the organization that submits to Allah’s Prophet On that side is Nehru’s Bharat, here you have the whole world O voters, open the ears of your hearts and listen, the threat to your Faith comes from the other side, There are no such dangers here."

"Muslim leaders deliberately spread false and baseless atrocity stories about East Punjab, and incited Muslims everywhere to murder and drive out Hindus and Sikhs. Especially was Pakistan propaganda openly and shamelessly directed against Sikhs. Zafar Ali Khan, proprietor of the Daily Zamindar of Lahore is a well-known Muslim League leader, and his paper an important League organ. On the 5th September in this paper appeared on the front page a highly inflammatory poem against the Sikhs, the last and telling line of which was: “Koi Sikh rehne na pae Maghribi Punjab men” (Let no Sikh be allowed to remain in Western Punjab)."

"Freedom is a precondition of profundity: no wonder philosophy has no place in the cultural life of Muslims. Religion is merely ritual without the spirtiual introspection that philosophical insight brings... It is not the task of religion to seek to reduce us from the straight path of reason."

"I lived in Malaysia for three years in the kind of uncertainty westerners face only in times of war. The five daily calls to prayer are the only predictable events in the capital city, Kuala Lumpur. The power cuts are frequent, the traffic jams continuous. Islam is the official religion, but materialism is the ruling creed. ... Islam is practised with ritual precision and with perfect reverence for its Arabian dimension. All Malays, including the royal family, look up to Arabs, the white men of the East."

"To deny that God sits upon a throne or speaks to humankind is to deny both the Quran and divine attributes. But to take it literally is to make God corporeal which amounts to ', literal anthropomorphism. Both are incorrect. Quranic assertions about God, however, must be believed - but bilā kaifā (without asking how). This last doctrine was originally developed by the othodox theologian and —jurist Ah.mad Ibn Hanbal, the founder of the last of the four Sunni schools of law. He was publicly in and incarcerated for his views during the rationalist inquisition. But his traditional views were to triumph later to become not only an incubus but an operative veto on the further inquiry in the metaphisical obsurities of the Quran."

"A responsibility of great art is to capture the zeitgeist in words with such expertise that you cannot understand that period without ignoring it. In the West, T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Wasteland’ is the best example of this. If anyone made migration a civilizational experience in Urdu poetry, it was no one except Kazmi. Surprisingly, an acclaimed scholar like Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, ignoring this aspect, spoke his mind by labelling Nasir as merely a poet of the tragic tone of love and passion. The nostalgia of Nasir is not personal, but civilisational. Sample a few verses of a ghazal from his diwan (collection) and Barg-e-Nai (‘Melody of the Flute’). Does this attitude feel like it springs from the failure of personal love."

"Ever centred in my thoughts, I resemble you alot. O, partner of the yesteryear, This year, I'm alone, alas! All day long in your lane, I, the hurtful stones amass. Who can look me in the face? I'm but your looking glass. You are the bustling street of life, I, the lonesome jungle path. The coming season shall weep for me, I'm the season's dying draught. In my wave lies my bane, I'm a river, athirst withal."

"Even though the gusts of zephyr knock till eternity on the red stone walls behind the city of flowers, no change will occur. Only that they will tire themselves."

"A raindrop stuck up in my lashes and sank in the eye."

"Like the rest of them, will you also examine the white, crystal today in the haze and mist of slimy yesterday? Do what you will but keep it in mind: the sun has also been accused of having necked and cuddled the night."

"When the noisy tide receded from the shore the frozen shiny sands suddenly moved beneath her feer. The girl standing knee-deep in water came to herself and mused: 'How familiar is this moment!'"

"Human ingenuity, science and industry have made it possible to provide each one of us everything we need to be comfortable provided these boundless treasures of nature and production are not declared the property of a greedy few but are used for the benefit of all of humanity… However, this is only possible if the foundations of human society are based not on greed, exploitation and ownership but on justice, equality, freedom and the welfare of everyone… I believe that humanity which has never been defeated by its enemies will, after all, be successful; at long last, instead of wars, hatred and cruelty, the foundation of humankind will rest on the message of the great Persian poet Hafez Shiraz: ‘Every foundation you see is faulty, except that of Love, which is faultless."

"Faiz’s revolutionary poetry was still banned by the regime, but one woman, a singer, defied Zia. It was always the women of Pakistan who gave the dictator the most grief. A year after the poet’s death, Iqbal Bano, a national icon, obtained rare permission to hold a concert in Lahore. There were some things even Zia couldn’t refuse. And there was a way of getting around the ban of singing and dancing: asking for permission to hold a “cultural event.” Bano wore a sari, a dress forbidden under Zia both because it was associated with enemy India and because it showed a woman’s midriff. And then she lent her voice, powerful but melodious, controlled but emotional, to the most defiant of all of Faiz’s verses, written in 1979 in protest at Zia’s authoritarian Islam. Hum dekhenge, she sang, we shall witness. For ten long minutes she sang the verses as the emotions of the crowd of fifty thousand Pakistanis rose and swelled with her, applause punctuating every pause."

"One of Pakistan’s greatest Urdu poets of the twentieth century, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, had spent the first few years of Zia’s time in power in prison and then in exile in Beirut, preferring the chaos of Lebanon’s civil war to the darkness of repression. An uncle and mentor of Taseer, the leftist poet of love and revolution had embraced the intellectual effervescence of Lebanon and found kindred spirits among the Palestinian revolutionaries sitting on café terraces during cease-fires. But the Palestinians kept attracting worse and worse Israeli retaliation and, in the summer of 1982, Israeli tanks reached Beirut. Faiz and his wife were forced to flee and return to Pakistan. He died in his home country a month before Zia’s referendum, perhaps in anticipation of the unbearable realization that the general had found a way, yet again, to stay in power."

"Faiz’s verses were deeply subversive. And they seemed directed not only at Zia the oppressor but also at those who proclaimed themselves the guardians of sacred places: the Saudis. There were screams of Inqilab zindabad at the concert: long live the revolution, in Urdu, long live the fight against Zia. A live recording of the song was smuggled out, and copies made on cassette tapes were passed around secretly and copied again until they had traveled well beyond the country’s borders. The Pakistan that Faiz had known was dying. So was the Beirut he had loved and left. The Lebanon of Musa Sadr and Hussein al-Husseini was no more."

"If ink and pen are snatched from me, shall I Who have dipped my finger in my heart's blood complain— Of if they seal my tongue, when I have made A mouth of every round link of my chain?"

"Love, do not ask me for that love again. Once I thought life, because you lived, a prize— The time's pain nothing, you alone were pain; Your beauty kept earth's springtime's from decay, My universe held only your bright eyes— If I won you, fate would be at my feet. It was not true, all this, but only wishing; Our world knows other torments than of love, And other happiness than a fond embrace. Dark curse of countless ages, savagery."

"Last night your lost memory so came into the heart As spring comes in the wilderness quietly, As the zephyr moves slowly in deserts, As rest comes without cause to a sick man."

"I had to listen when my friends told me to wash my eyes with blood Everything at once was tangled in blood — each face, each idol, red everywhere. Blood swept over the sun, washing away its gold. The moon erupted with blood, its silver extinguished."

"At the bosom of the heaven, The woe keeps on spinning the wheel. The Milestone accompanies for hours, But the journey doesn’t end anywhere. The night is ready to meet the dawn, But my distance is not yet over. My children’s misfortunes Have stained my clothes, And the aloneness continues to lick my blood. The straws I gather from the ridge of the suburb, The Sun transforms them into the woes. It’s the eyes, that caused my dreams to burn, I remain under the sneaky watch of my own coffin."

"This evening, I am being released. I sit in the courtyard of the Psychiatric Asylum and write this. Half an hour ago, the women bid me farewell; they gathered about me: we all began crying together in loud, mournful tones. The eye on the lock shut itself: the door was opened. They stood clinging to the bars, still crying. I turned and asked, perplexed: “Aren’t you happy for me girls? I’m finally free.” “No Sara Shagufta.” They spoke, almost in one voice. “Don’t you know? You’re now stepping into the real mental asylum.”"

"He grabbed me. We got into a terrible fight. My verdict was given: “You will now be given an electric shock, Shagufta. We need to calm you down.” I tore away, and ran to the other side of the asylum, and on one of its walls, I wrote: “Nazi Camp.” He began grinning."

"I woke up that night to the screams of women. I don’t know when I’d fallen asleep, or passed out, but when I woke up, the manic, lost, women were all around me, walking, shambling. I remember that night, my first night in this asylum – I had retreated into the corner, into the shadows, and looked through the bars, bars that had been chained with many locks. The locks were like eyes: the eyes of a man’s vigilance. As I focused, the lock slowly extended to reveal the form of a man, a man sprawling on the bed: I thought of the violence of beds, of my marriage. The man on this bed was my husband – a man who used to beat me metal-blue to eliminate his fear of women. There were other ways of elimination: polishing his black boots and making them shine, washing his clothes, suspending them onto a hanging wire. And the starvation. And the rising lilt of his family’s voices: awaara. A cuss word, a slap – his marriage to me? – The violence of a mongering dog, his teeth digging into my flesh. His skin the color of a chameleon turned blue. Me? I was a churi, a glass bangle. The house? The impersonation of a ghetto. My agency, his anger. So I ran. I ran to a divorce, yes, and I reached my destination after six months of torture. But the six months led to psychosis. So my mother dragged me here, to this mental asylum. Then I woke up, that night, to the screams of women."

"I, who standing at the crossroad, Wish to return to my curve. He, who’s stuck in the blood, Desires to live a bit more … With the wall the shadow might have become one, As the grieves are soothing in the ocean. Thou steal the sunshine even from the setting sun, I rather evade the little darkness of the dawn. And the weary star of the daybreak, When left all alone on the firmament, I regard that moment. Each passing day on this earth Does sever a part of my years."

"She awakens by the touch of the hunger, The snapping of the boughs, Yet two-draughts thirst more. God offers hunger, In how many flavours."

"Moving among dead bodies These dead cried out to the dead: Dervishes, go on sleeping! There is no morning tomorrow."

"Beggening their voyage with salty deep, By sweet water they returned, Big merchants trade not with Gold but with Pearls and Gemstones...such wealth, these Sailors form distant lands had brought."

"Prince of Medina, listen to my calling-"

"Clouds return and once again, it rains, Lighting's flash from all sides, and with them, Some go to Istanbul others turn to the west, Some shine bright over China and others take care of, Samarqand, some wandered to Rome, to Kabul and Kandahar, some lie on Delhi, Deccan thundering over... My beloved Allah, may you always make Sindh a land of abundance, My beloved Allah, may you make prosperous the whole universe."

"Those that all night keep awake, And Allah's name unceasingly take, Their yearning Abdul Latif says, For all time unforgotten stays, Among those that come before Allah for adoration, On them countless more shall send their homages and prayers."

"Festivals that common men celebrate, are hunger and thirst to them, intoxicated in Allah's love they fast Eid and joy they never celebrate"

"na may sta da nari shundi dy pakar na da zulfi wal pa wal laka khamar na da bati pashan danga ghari ghwaram nargasay stargy na daki da khumar na ghakhuna dy laluna da adan na nangy dak sara sara laka anar na pasti da sarindy pa shan khabari na wajood laka da saar way mazadar khu bas yow shai rata ra ukhaya dilbara da lala pashan zargy ghawaram daghdar yow dawa ukhaqi chi da ghum ao muhabat way lakuno laluna dy karam zaar"

"I do not need your red sculpted lips, Nor hair in loops like a serpent’s coils, Nor a nape as graceful as a swan’s, Nor narcissus eyes full of drunkenness, Nor teeth as perfect as pearls of heaven, Nor cheeks ruddy and full as pomegranates, Nor a voice mellifluous as a sarinda, Nor a figure as elegant as a poplar, But show me just this one thing, my love, I seek a heart stained like a poppy flower – Pearls by millions I would gladly cede, For the sake of tears borne of love and grief."