Poetry at Sangam
Poetry at Sangam showcases poetry in English and translations as well as essays on poetics and news of new releases.
The night in your song is a jasmine that blooms on the roads to the summer
which lie between us.
In the silence of this night, don’t call out to me.
Where does the sparrow return after the last siege? It flies past the blood of the last dusk
and unfurls the doors of prisons carved in the cheeks of our sky. In the prisons, we will dig
apart the rubble of the long night when we lay awake, the cold in our hands blooming into paisley,
just as it does in currencies hid by poets in old books.
Come if only a moment. What to tell you of the ache of separation.
Soon, the night promises, there will be one more day to cast summer off
in the gardens of long dead that bloom on the shriveled Dal.
Look ahead of you, exile stretches its arms
over the outstretched obituaries. The river of our winters turns at the bend
of your mirrors, where we watch, blinded, the reflections of past summer-moons
glide in and out. Like moths in poems written under candles,
we hold death by night in palms bound shut by spools of barbed wire.
The night is a wound that opens on the lips of your song sung between us. In the song
another road opens to us to cross over to the daffodils that suffered at our hands.
Come Dilbar, the flowers are abloom, come once
We raised our forgotten nights in the dark from which gushed out
dried streams of blood; our cries.
We have cried over the scent of stones
that bear witness to our names in the sheets of forgotten snow.
There we will die
and there our blood will plant apples. In their bruises, we will burnish
our story and wait for the night to end it. We will put our faith in the sparrow
that flies away, await its return on the feathers of a dream
The night is a prayer that flowers in our fields, and when the prayer ends,
we will return and rewrite what the rain wrote for us on the rocks.
At the gates of Harmukh I await, I will offer whatever pleases you.