Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry

AGHA SHAHID ALI

AGHA SHAHID ALI Born in New Delhi in 1949 and raised in Kashmir, Agha Shahid Ali moved to the United States in the 1980s. His nine volumes of poetry include Call Me Ishmael Tonight: A Book of Ghazals (2003), Rooms Are Never Finished (2001), The Country without a Post Office (1997), and A Nostalgist’s Map of America (1991), all published by W. W. Norton, as well as The Beloved Witness: Selected Poems (Viking, 1992), A Walk through the Yellow Pages (Sun, 1987), The Half-Inch Himalayas (Wesleyan University Press, 1987), In Memory of Begum Akhtar and Other Poems (Writers Workshop, 1979), and Bone Sculpture (Writers Workshop, 1972). Ali’s awards included fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, as well as a Pushcart Prize. He spent the last ten years of his life teaching at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He died on December 8, 2001. A Pastoral For Suvir Kaul on the wall the dense ivy of executions —ZBIGNIEW HERBERT We shall meet again, in Srinagar, by the gates of the Villa of Peace, our hands blossoming into fists till the soldiers return the keys and disappear. Again we’ll enter our last world, the first that vanished in our absence from the broken city. We’ll tear our shirts for tourniquets and bind the open thorns, warm the ivy into roses. Quick, by the pomegranate— the bird will say—Humankind can bear everything. No need to stop the ear 225 to stories rumored in branches: We’ll hear our gardener’s voice, the way we did as children, clear under trees he’d planted: “It’s true, my death, at the mosque entrance, in the massacre, when the Call to Prayer opened the floodgates”—Quick, follow the silence— “and dawn rushed into everyone’s eyes.” Will we follow the horned lark, pry open the back gate into the poplar groves, go past the search post into the cemetery, the dust still uneasy on hurried graves with no names, like all new ones in the city? “It’s true” (we’ll hear our gardener again). “That bird is silent all winter. Its voice returns in spring, a plaintive cry. That’s when it saw the mountain falcon rip open, in mid-air, the blue magpie, then carry it, limp from the talons.” Pluck the blood: My words will echo thus at sunset, by the ivy, but to what purpose? In the drawer of the cedar stand, white in the verandah, we’ll find letters: When the post offices died, the mailman knew we’d return to answer them. Better if he let them speed to death, blacked out by Autumn’s Press Trust— not like this, taking away our breath, holding it with love’s anonymous scripts: “See how your world has cracked. Why aren’t you here? Where are you? Come back. Is history deaf there, across the oceans?” Quick, the bird will say. And we’ll try 226 AGHA SHAHID ALI the keys, with the first one open the door into the drawing room. Mirror after mirror, textiled by dust, will blind us to our return as we light oil lamps. The glass map of our country, still on the wall, will tear us to lace— We’ll go past our ancestors, up the staircase, holding their wills against our hearts. Their wish was we return—forever!—and inherit (Quick, the bird will say) that to which we belong, not like this— to get news of our death after the world’s. Ghazal The only language of loss left in the world is Arabic— These words were said to me in a language not Arabic. Ancestors, you’ve left me a plot in the family graveyard— Why must I look, in your eyes, for prayers in Arabic? Majnoon, his clothes ripped, still weeps for Laila. O, this is the madness of the desert, his crazy Arabic. Who listens to Ishmael? Even now he cries out: Abraham, throw away your knives, recite a psalm in Arabic. From exile Mahmoud Darwish writes to the world: You’ll all pass between the fleeting words of Arabic. The sky is stunned, it’s become a ceiling of stone. I tell you it must weep. So kneel, pray for rain in Arabic. At an exhibition of miniatures, such delicate calligraphy: Kashmiri paisleys tied into the golden hair of Arabic! The Koran...