Inescapable Disaster Xxix Poem by Sadiqullah Khan

Have your soul the same destiny as mine,
Singing to those who have been drowned.
Songs of autumn and winter next day,
High winds break your wings, the rain soothes.

You make me belong to you not by beauty
Of your rainbow cheek. But by the misery
Be it in the steppes of hills, from terror refuge
Be it from the awaited future bringing bleak hopes.

Greif-stricken they sell caps of freedom and scarves
And listen the ‘bulletin'. Whose job it is not his.
The sorrow-stricken grass is bowed since centuries,
Will it be the high flying mane of a horse on air?

My shoulders weigh a hundred elephants
And my feet have the lightness of thunder struck.
This dug earth, heaps of mud, is living gold
My poverty oft visits, my streets are dark.

Under the sway of the waning moon, I am
A new ferocity is loosed every other day, every night.
Leap up leap up, from my wounded heart, radiant
Ray. My vision carries me through the heavy mist.

I can't break the vault by closing eyes, or prayer
Now for me is what's been happening I count
On the rock of your face, is inscribed, the cause
Of sufferings, deaths, disease and inescapable disaster.

-On a visit to Azadi Square in Islamabad, September 11,2014.

Sadiqullah Khan
Islamabad
September 11,2014.