The Dream of the Blind
In the murky dawn of conversion,
The land is still abound with pyromaniacs,
Self-congratulatory, self-righteous as ever,
Learning nil from the heap of ashes,
And the cycle of bloodbath.
Bent upon mere personal perpetuation,
They play the farce of concurrence
On the vault of general hope,
Leaving the common lot with
The sole subsistence of glory days.
Many are maneuvered again into
Playing the blind man’s game,
Shrouded eyes
Seeking the blind spot of progression.
Pledging another novel era of fortification
By turning the endemic chaos
Into a never-never land,
The pecuniary stuntmen hustle around,
Their bags teeming with otherworldly stats.
The same sordid machine,
The same corroding cogs!
Evading the blitz of indigence,
They preach to the breadless a nirvana,
Utterly devoid of peace of mind and bliss.
Where autocratic impulse is kept intact
At the cost of general concern,
Self-seeking aphorisms are
Interpolated into the law of the land
And the founding ideals at whim.
The reeking status quo is bound to persist
In such a land governed
By the ethos of egotism,
Apathy, guile, recklessness and inaction.
The self-inflicted oblivion
Stifles the spirit of labor,
The door to the treasure trove of Nature.
Then the dreams of many are at stake
Along with the grand Founding Dream.
[8/08]
Unfathered In The Packed Street
To my as much loved father as time’s life and thereafter The heart-tearing wave of blood sweeping through
The place blurred the curtain of avid vision.
And the traumatized brain conceded
An unwilling procrastination of this woe’s account.
The breath-gnawing stealer struck
The sand stage of life.
And the vacant eyes stared at the vacuum
Left by his abrupt absence in the swarming street.
A few words were strangulated
In an unsounded shadowy sepulcher of silence,
In the melancholic mire of heart, unsaid, unheard.
While the light deserted the dark dungeon
Yet again to be on an infinite furlough,
But the loyal breath lingered till
Lastly parting the company.
And the deafening cogency of
His words surpassed all shutters,
‘Life surrendered walking in the street
Is much better than the one setting in the bed.’
While somewhere on the extant side of the split
A few soundless thoughts stirred, surged, soared
And then sank in an incommunicable inner dark.
[12/07]
Something Beyond The Prism Of Time
* (JOTAC nomination for the Pushcart Prize in poetry 2006)
Mother! Captives of this dream have suffered a lot,When will this dream end?If you had her heart,
You would never have dreamed
Of apathetically strangling that
Speechless sage to silence in your
Murky, sun-flouting, watery labyrinths.
If you had your will unlike Sisyphus to
Revolt that night even for a millisecond
Against the recurring scheme of universe
And glance over the gnarled, bewailing and
Destined-to-lifelong-bereavement mortals,
You would presumably never have allied with the
Cosmic indifference to set the stormy winds
Toward this little abode of sand.
Where shall these fugitive mortals asylum now
Who witnessed their whole accumulation,
Sole asset and single expectation burying in
Deep-down-dust with tearful helplessness,
Being shackled by clandestine, incomprehensible
Cords reigning and maneuvering all existence.
How will the lap of these enduring have-nots
Be replenished who are left on the temporal
Still palpable side of the great divide.
He descended in the bottomless sea of time,
Not in your fathomable watery traps.
Is that your ceaseless smooth flow which renders
You claim parallelism and resemblance with time!
But time is more eternal than you,
As you will face desiccation someday
Like many others of your kind which
Withered from the earth and the worlds beyond.
He drowned in the time’s catholic heart,
For what revolutions, mutations, catastrophes,
Wars and peace are not veiled but in
The infinite womb of time!
Yet the King of the moments of
Life flows with consummate grace.
O you mortals!
Why do you pile your anecdotes over anecdotes
To lighten the burden of these novel entrants
Into the confinement of dejection.
For what your common apocalyptic anecdotes
Are beside the grand anecdote being played by the
Inscrutable and self-intent Actors on the stage of time.
Get yourself rid of this mantra of tales,
And sing the serene song of silence in sadness.
For who knows when the final exit dawns,
But the kiss of eternity is beyond the prism of time.
*In memory of my loved-by-all cousin, Saud Butt.
Present Infinite And Dense
Apprehensions of future can bear
No effect on our present intimacies,
For future is a non-entity,
Merely a guiseless projection of Present.
And the ever-floating ship of haunting change in which
We sail is a lifelong prisoner of the sea of Present.
In Present we begin and in Present we end.
Hence it is ordained that our intimacy in Present
Is intact sans any perils of illusory future,
Intact through sensitive mental and intuitive bonds,
We albeit temporal constants, constantly be
United in Present though distant.
Measurement
Out of his earthly casual routine wanderings,
But with fancy fluttering farther a skylark’s flight,
He decided measuring the pace of dynamic time.
In fact the dynamism of time had now
Really accelerated in an electric-fast manner.
And roads proffered him the best
Resort to conduct this odd experiment.
Vans which ran in the same direction
Could not formulate a plausible appraisal.
But the vans which ran in opposite directions
And which crossed one another like a whizzing flash
Afforded a just measurement of speedy time.
For receding roads and receding vans
Flaunted a fitting testimony to it.
Time was aflying westward and
Perhaps was nearing down its peak.
Palsy Resides On Where Day Ends
Each wrinkle of her face fell like
A blunt blade on his heart.
For an age resided on each of them,
With such tales engraved which even
All-embracing life found puzzling.
This drove him to take a temporal
Departure from the incumbent reality
Of the world and land in a distant land.
Where images of palsy were scattered
All around and each shrouded remnants of past.
And dreamy past kept distancing unceasingly.
Where rheumatic palsy had twists set in each
Joint and which were furthered by a bent head
And back, while youth strutted around outside
And avoided stepping the uninhabitable land.
Where such retrograde moves like reconnecting
To departed times return unrewarded.
And during long sans-sleep nights one takes each
Turn with mounting apprehensions on the
Sarcophagus bed surrounded by uncanny visions which
Descend on blurring senses without any confrontation.
No panacea could sustain these sinking
And flickering dusty-lamps which condemned
Those who aspire for elixir.
Where cursing the unending homogeneity of the
Days of life men cried, “Repetition, repetition,
Repetition, we have suffered within the grip of
This ever-revisiting and encircling repetition.”
These were the detainees of a misty marooned island
Hid from the eyes of the world which was
Bordered by the waters of melancholy.
“Put out the lamp as the morn is alight,”
Heralded the dawn chorus which broke plaintive spell.
And with uneven breath and declining rattle behind
His back, he left the dotage-land,
For the pseudo-reality of the world was
Too compelling to drag him back.
Birth Astride Of A Dual World
This birth astride of a dual world
Has bestowed on man a split being.
Both counter-running real and ideal compose
Man’s ephemeral timespan on this earth.
Even to cope with the reality of life
And to erect his worldly-self
Each man imitates an ideal set in his imagination.
Most men get lost in what is apparent, luring and real.
But there are few others who dare to ascend
The labyrinth ladder of ineffable perfection
And yet have insanity pronounced on them
By the echoes of a matter-driven age.
An insurmountable task which perhaps is equivalent
To walking on the edge of sword is to maintain
The balance between two antagonist-and-
Yet-explicable-in-togetherness-worlds.
Still seeking imperfection and perfection through
The nexus of reciprocity has been the most
Ancient riddle dawned on men.
It is easier for few unyielding forlorn lunatics too,
To fuse in the cycle of all-pervading reality along with
Millions and millions followers of
Material-multidimensional-deity than in a dream.
But where do real and ideal converge
Remains a cryptic meeting place.
While men keep clinging between two worlds,
Settling neither in one nor the other, sharing same lot.
Many cross the threshold of reality but few
Prefer to exist as self-proclaimed outcasts,
Lingering along the edge of the ultimate.
But eventually, nearly all end remaining short of
The verge and bereft of the essence of twin worlds.
Rizwan Saeed Ahmed is from Kotli, Azad Kashmir. He is 27 years old. He earned his master's in English literature from IIU, Islamabad, Pakistan, in September 2004. He has had over two dozen poems published in several substantial online and print publications of poetry in America, Australia, Canada, England, India and Pakistan. He also translates works of Urdu poetry and prose into English for the Pakistan Academy of Letters. He is currently working on his M.Phil, American Studies thesis at QAU, Islamabad.
