ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Adeeba Shahid Talukder is a Pakistani American poet, singer, and translator of Urdu and Persian poetry. She is the author of What Is Not Beautiful (Glass Poetry Press, 2018) and her book Shahr-e-jaanaan: The City of the Beloved (Tupelo Press, 2020), was awarded the Kundiman Poetry Prize. Her poetry has appeared in Poem-A-Day, Gulf Coast, Meridian, The Margins, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. A Best of the Net finalist and Pushcart nominee, Adeeba holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan and a 2017 Emerging Poets Fellowship from Poets House.
Also by Adeeba Shahid Talukder:
Shahr-e-jaanaan: The City of the Beloved
The Gods of the Age
Dividing Line
Previously in Glass: A Journal of Poetry:
What Is Not Beautiful
On Lightning and Rest
Rahguzar: The Path
— after Murtaza Birlas
Beloved,
jaan-e-jahaanam,
if I am your shadow,
why do you pull
me apart? Look: the dark of us
splitting on the sidewalk —
the long, the mid-afternoon dark
of us.
I followed you once, seeing
in your face my own light.
You threaded me
like a pearl, held me
captive in tomorrow’s fog:
a heart stained with the ink of sin.
I once relished
to live in this golden cage:
a bird clipped of his wings,
head bowed, sitting in a pile
of his own feathers.
I implore:
do not sever me
from you,
you
from me.
I will only return
to your doorstep
to anoint my forehead
again with its dust.
My beloved, tell me,
if I were not a shadow
but a stone all along,
why didn’t you move me
from your path,
punish me, once,
to your heart’s content?
I first heard Murtaza Birlas's ghazal ek baar hi jee bhar ke ("just once, to your heart's content") in the voice of the legendary singer Noor Jahan. In her lilt, I heard the grief of the lover rejected by the beloved, but also a playfulness, an attempt at spectacle to get her attention. The music to which the ghazal was set was perhaps the most breathtaking of anything I had ever heard— each time I listened, it cast a spell over me, and even as I sang it myself, I felt intoxicated. I composed "Rahguzar" because I knew that only in allowing this beauty to consume me was my greatest capacity for poetry, my highest exaltation.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
