Now Bury Her Poem by Sadiqullah Khan

Like everything from the past, and like
The frozen statues, made of stones, carved
Into rocks. Like the long graves of unklnown persons;
Termed holy, in the middle of the roads. Like pyramids.
Mayas, Buddha’s, Assyrians or Gandharians, and every other relic.

Louvre, let make another history, another goddess.
Mona Lisa, seated in the octagonal glass, and by a master’s hands
Touched. She has a mischievous smile. A band around her head.
Some say, she is a he. The beauty lies in her asymmetry,
The artist was a decorumist, figurative: imagine
What she would have been in the hands of Marcel Duchamp,
Salvadore Dali and Willem de Kooning. She might have landed
In an orgy, or a photographer of a genre of black and white
With a war background. She would have known
The ins and outs of life. Living in today’s slum
A refugee camp, a brothel, or even a much sought celebrity.

Free all gods and goddesses; they are sick of your tantrums and worship:
O mankind.

-On Mona Lisa Portrait

Sadiqullah Khan
Peshawar
August 5,2013.