No Road Back Home

In this forgotten place I have no lover’s touch
Each night brings darker dreams, I have no amulet
My life is all I ask, I have no other thirst
These silent thoughts torment, I have no way to hope

Who I once was, what I’ve become, I cannot know
Who could I tell my heart’s desires, I cannot say
My love, the temper of the fates I cannot guess
I long to go to you, I have no strength to move

Through cracks and crevices I’ve watched the seasons change
For news of you I’ve looked in vain to buds and flowers
To the marrow of my bones I’ve ached to be with you
What road led here, why do I have no road back home

---Abduqadir Jalalidin (a detained Uighur poet, bears witness to the suffering of Uighurs detained in Chinese so-called “reeducation” camps) 

Onion

The smoothness of onions infuriates him
so like the skin of women or their expensive clothes
and the striptease of onions, which is also a disappearing act.
He says he is searching for the ultimate nakedness
but when he finds that thin green seed
that negligible sprout of a heart
we could have told him he'd be disappointed.
Meanwhile the onion has been hacked to bits
and he's weeping in the kitchen most unromantic tears.

--- Katha Pollitt

आठ मिनट छियालीस सेकंड

दो मिनट नहीं
आठ मिनट छियालीस सेकंड का
मौन रखा गया अमेरिका में
जॉर्ज फ़्लॉयड की स्मृति-सभा में

गोरा पुलिस अफ़सर
आठ मिनट छियालीस सेकंड
अपने घुटने से
जॉर्ज फ़्लॉयड के
गले को दबाता रहा
जब तक कि उनकी जान
नहीं चली गयी
और वह कहते रहे :
"मैं साँस नहीं ले पा रहा हूँ"

किसी मज़लूम की याद में
महज़ दो मिनट का
मौन मत रखो
इस रस्म को बदलो

कोई तो रिश्ता हो
तुम्हारे सुलूक का
मृतक के अपमान
और यातना से

---पंकज चतुर्वेदी

Let them not say

Let them not say: we did not see it.
We saw.

Let them not say: we did not hear it.
We heard.

Let them not say: they did not taste it.
We ate, we trembled.

Let them not say: it was not spoken, not written.

We spoke,
we witnessed with voices and hands.
Let them not say: they did nothing.
We did not-enough.

Let them say, as they must say something:

A kerosene beauty.
It burned.

Let them say we warmed ourselves by it,
read by its light, praised,
and it burned.

---Jane Hirshfield

अगर रोज कर्फ्यू के दिन हों

अगर रोज कर्फ्यू के दिन हों
तो कोई अपनी मौत नहीं मरेगा
कोई किसी को मार देगा
पर मैं स्वाभाविक मौत मरने तक
जिन्दा रहना चाहता हूँ
दूसरों के मारने तक नहीं
और रोज की तरह
अपना शहर रोज घूमना चाहता हूँ।

शहर घूमना मेरी आदत है ऐसी
आदत कि कर्फ्यू के दिन भी
किसी तरह दरवाजे खटखटा कर
सबके हालचाल पूछूँ

हो सकता है हत्यारे का दरवाजा भी खटखटाऊँ
अगर वह हिन्दू हुआ तो
अपनी जान हिन्दू कह कर न बचाऊँ
मुसलमान कहूँ
अगर मुसलमान हुआ तो
अपनी जान मुसलमान कह कर न बचाऊँ
हिन्दू कहूँ

हो सकता है इसके बाद
भी मेरी जान बच जाये
तो मैं दूसरों के मारने तक नहीं
अपने मरने तक जिन्दा रहूँ।

-- विनोद कुमार शुक्ल

Where Are the War Poets?

They who in folly or mere greed
Enslaved religion, markets, laws,
Borrow our language now and bid
Us to speak up in freedom’s cause.

It is the logic of our times,
No subject for immortal verse—
That we who lived by honest dreams
Defend the bad against the worse.

--- Cecil Day-Lewis

“In Jerusalem”

In Jerusalem, and I mean within the ancient walls,
I walk from one epoch to another without a memory
to guide me. The prophets over there are sharing
the history of the holy ... ascending to heaven
and returning less discouraged and melancholy, because love
and peace are holy and are coming to town.

I was walking down a slope and thinking to myself: How
do the narrators disagree over what light said about a stone?
Is it from a dimly lit stone that wars flare up?
I walk in my sleep. I stare in my sleep. I see
no one behind me. I see no one ahead of me.
All this light is for me. I walk. I become lighter. I fly

then I become another. Transfigured. Words
sprout like grass from Isaiah’s messenger
mouth: “If you don’t believe you won’t be safe.”
I walk as if I were another. And my wound a white
biblical rose. And my hands like two doves
on the cross hovering and carrying the earth.

I don’t walk, I fly, I become another,
transfigured. No place and no time. So who am I?
I am no I in ascension’s presence. But I
think to myself: Alone, the prophet Muhammad
spoke classical Arabic. “And then what?”
Then what? A woman soldier shouted:

Is that you again? Didn’t I kill you?
I said: You killed me ... and I forgot, like you, to die.

--- Mahmoud Darwish