POETRY of Agha Shahid Ali

[Jannah]

Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali is the author of five volumes of poetry, including The Country Without a Post Office (1997), Bone Sculpture (1972), In Memory of Begum Akhtar and Other Poems (1979), The Half-Inch Himalayas (1987), A Walk Through the Yellow Pages (1987), A Nostalgist's Map of America (1991), and The Beloved Witness: Selected Poems (1992). He is also the author of T. S. Eliot as Editor (1986) and has translated the work of Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz in The Rebel's Silhouette: Selected Poems (1992).

Ali was born in New Delhi on February 4, 1949. He grew up Muslim in Kashmir, and was later educated at the University of Kashmir, Srinagar, and University of Delhi. He earned a Ph.D. in English from Pennsylvania State University in 1984, and an M.F.A. from the University of Arizona in 1985. He has held teaching positions at the University of Delhi, Penn State, SUNY Binghamton, and Hamilton College, and is currently on leave from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

[Jannah]

Code Select Expand


A Villanelle

When the ruins dissolve like salt in water,
only when will they have destroyed everything.
Let your blood till then embellish the 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 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 altar?
O Kashmir, Armenia once vanished. Words are nothing,
just rumors—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