Derrida’s Deconstruction Poem by Sadiqullah Khan

Where she finds the wed of pen and ink
‘Sappho thrice removed from reality’
Says Plato, one of the two without whom
Human knowledge is incomplete, the other is the Bard.
The Magician ending the time’s play
A nudity eating white clay
In the rapturous delirium of wanting to give birth.
The three fold meaning and the deconstructed
Thought had an amazingly beautiful structure in lines.
Random doubt and arbitrary subversion
By a sharpened reed-nib and an intellect never bereft.
‘but by careful teasing out of warring forces of signification
within the text itself’. Nothing has been destroyed.
The signification is fundamentally at variance-
‘il n’y a rein hors du texte’ or, alternately, ‘il n’y a pas de hors- texte’
A text may possess so many different meanings that it cannot have a meaning.
‘Intertextuality’, they had accused Orhan Pamuk with it.
You are the Kastori, and you shall find your own fragrance with it,
And the foreword is by the Queen of Egypt wearing Serpent of Nile
In her crown. The book is thicker and is random
In continual difference, to include what is not included.

-On Charu Gandhi, reviewing my book, ‘Chasing Shadows’.

Sadiqullah Khan
Islamabad
February 12,2015.