Her Hair Made Of Fire Poem by Sadiqullah Khan

You will mount the horse whose mane
Flows longer than foot, and is made
Like the girl of eloquent pout, high chin
Her hair made of fire, and her wings
Of air. The magician is long dead,
What ails thee, none other will be born.

There could be none else so full of pity
Like the gatherers of hardened ‘chests'
On the breasts of dead warriors, -poets
And authors, writing by the graveyards
Who wear ‘one tooth of gold, and feed
Themselves on onions' or like the prayer
Call, by the ones, who has oft been beaten
By the cruel parent, and now fears the god.

The other who laughed ominously
And another who was holding an ‘exhibition'
By stealing ‘hearts of poor', adored behind
Wall papers of nude girls ‘who went to bed
Because of hunger', and melancholy.
Who told stories of immense misery
Who were there to be interviewed for pittance, and
They were coming from ‘Oxford' with a paper knife.

Sadiqullah Khan
Islamabad
April 24,2014.

A detail from Women Encircled by the Flight of a Bird,1941. Photograph: © Successió Miró/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2011, by Joan Miro @ the guardian