#agha shahid ali

[derangedrhythms]

Agha Shahid Ali, The Half-Inch Himalayas; from 'The Previous Occupant'

[sivavakkiyar]

translated by Agha Shahid Ali. happy birthday, Faiz.

[lunamonchtuna]

— Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Before You Came, tr. by Agha Shahid Ali (via lunamonchtuna)

[seekingstars]

A Villanelle - Agha Shahid Ali

[dk-thrive]

The world is full of paper. Write to me.

— Agha Shahid Ali, from "Stationery" in "The Half-Inch Himalayas" 1987, Wesleyan University Press). (via Regina Rosenfeld)

[desigrrrl]

— Faiz Ahmed Faiz, August 1952 (translated by Agha Shahid Ali)

[mooonflowwer]

"It rains as i write this" Agha Shahid Ali

i cry everytime i read it, this man will always be alive in hearts.

[ceeturnalia]

agha shahid ali

[loneberry]

Some beautiful examples of later Persian ghazals. Yes, the pain is both the illness and the remedy. I hope to continue my study of Islamic mystical literature and Sufi metaphysics.

.

Journal notes:

This is the double life I live—one life lived in the realm of the phantom, where I talk to invisible entities that feel more alive to me than my life, like William Blake talking to the angels and dead people all day, to the chagrin of his wife. Agha Shahid Ali writes, “See angels pour the Word through a sieve forever.” I can hear it. Water is the language of angels. Teresa of Ávila writes, “There are certain spiritual things which I can find no way of explaining more aptly than by this element of water…” It flows from the source. Didn’t that language undo me, when the sound of the waterfall appeared in the meditation recording? The Word flows through the sieve of the world. I can’t catch it. Help me, o lord, drink directly from the source, to feel no pity for the martyrs of love but only for those who will never know the delicious taste of suffering for love.

[dreamertrilogys]

Land by Agha Shahid Ali (1949-2001), a Kashmiri American Muslim poet

[gothhabiba]

A Villanelle

When the ruins dissolve like salt in water, only then will they have destroyed everything. Let your blood till then embellish slaughter,

till dawn soaks up its inks, and "On their blotter of fog the trees / Seem a botanical drawing." Will the ruins dissolve like salt in the water?

A woman combs—at noon—the ruins for her daughter. Chechnya is gone. What roses will you bring— plucked from shawls at dusk—to wreathe the slaughter?

Or are these words plucked from God that you've brought her, this comfort: They will not have destroyed everything till the ruins, too, are destroyed? Like salt in water,

what else besides God disappears at the alter? O Kashmir, Armenia once vanished. Words are nothing, just rumours—like roses—to embellish a slaughter:

these of a columnist: "The world will not stir"; these on the phone: "When you leave in the morning, you never know if you'll return." Lost in water, blood falters; then swirled to roses, it salts the slaughter.

-Agha Shahid Ali

[derangedrhythms]

Agha Shahid Ali, The Half-Inch Himalayas; from 'Snowmen'

[kaalbela]

The Country Without a Post Office by Agha Shahid Ali.

[muhtesemz]

Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s letter to Agha Shahid Ali, accepting his request to translate Faiz’s poetry into English.

[contremineur]

In Kashmir where the year has four clear seasons, my mother spoke of her childhood in the plains of Lucknow, and of that season in itself, the monsoon, when Krishna’s flute is heard on the shores of the Jamuna. She played old records by the Banaras thumri-singers, Siddheshwari and Rasoolan, their voices longing, when the clouds gather, for that invisible blue god. Separation can’t be borne when the rains come: this every lyric says. While children run out into the alleys, soaking their utter summer, messages pass between lovers. Heer and Ranjha and others of legends, their love forbidden, burned incense all night, waiting for answers. My mother hummed Heer’s lament but never told me if she also burned sticks of jasmine that, dying, kept raising soft necks of ash. I imagined each neck leaning on the humid air. She only said: The monsoons never cross the mountains into Kashmir.

Agha Shahid Ali, The season of the plains

from here

[beforevenice]

Water, be my memory, let me see what I have lost.

// Agha Shahid Ali