In keeping with the recent posts about poetry, here's a poem that deserves poem-of-the-month award on Whims of a Wordcrafter which I came across looking through a student's anthology; I felt the imagery was just utterly stunning yet simplistic. Impressively, it had echoes of Rumi's language throughout, whose poetry I admire a lot. It's not often you read a piece of poetry that stays with you even now (as much of us are fond of erasing the pain-staking memories of remembering rhyming couplets, enjambment and alliteration definitions in our GCSEs and Alevels) and this is definitely one of them...
GHAZAL
If I am the grass and you the breeze, blow through me.
If I am the rose and you the bird, then woo me.
If you are the rhyme and I the refrain, don’t hang
on my lips, come and I’ll come too when you cue me.
If yours is the iron fist in the velvet glove
when the arrow flies, the heart is pierced, tattoo me.
If mine is the venomous tongue, the serpent’s tail,
charmer, use your charm, weave a spell and subdue me.
If I am the laurel leaf in your crown, you are
the arms around my bark, arms that never knew me.
Oh would that I were bark! So old and still in leaf.
And you, dropping in my shade, dew to bedew me!
What shape should I take to marry your own, have you
– hawk to my shadow, moth to my flame – pursue me?
If I rise in the east as you die in the west,
die for my sake, my love, every night renew me.
If, when it ends, we are just good friends, be my Friend,
muse, lover and guide, Shamsuddin to my Rumi.
Be heaven and earth to me and I’ll be twice the me
I am, if only half the world you are to me.
MIMI KHALVATI
0 comments:
Post a Comment