Adeeba Shahid Talukder
Episode (in which Ghalib’s grandeur is clothed with the scarlet of a woman who has lost everything)
A white room,
my madness jewelled—
the wedding night
sacred & red,
gold, glimmering.
A nurse watched
as I scribbled quickly in black
crayon, like a prophet.
God knows what poetry
those sheets held,
and what golden
threads of my imagination
were snipped that night;
I waited for you, and longed
and grieved,
and when you didn’t arrive
I began to sing,
softly, the notes
of lamentation:
I was not fated to see my beloved
tonight.
And then louder
as spectacle,
(a child’s tantrum,
a God’s rage,
a man’s pleading at the execution grounds)—
without shame
or veil, my voice rose,
soared above
that cruel night & found
and troubled God,
the wine of my existence
spilled from its
delicate cup
with rapture & purpose.
Ammi, terrified,
wept and implored God
to forgive me
& forgive her
for letting the storm
and tangle of me, coiled,
burst forth
as a flood of sin.
And when I at last
descended and lost everything
of light,
I could not sing again
without the air
getting caught in my throat
and Ammi rising abruptly
to pray. Her white dupatta
clothed my sky,
and her prayers undid
the knots of dark magic,
& made of my voice
again a shrine and gave it
the softness & restraint
of a drawn arrow.
I cried out:
I have to sing to feel like I am breathing.
He advised:
If you must sing, put your mouth
inside an earthen pot,
then sing.
A Song for Begum Akhtar
Akhtari,
your cry
a dark spell—your sway
over men
wicked.
Smother this flame;
a woman
isn’t made
for spectacle, a woman
can ruin a man.
Soundless, Akhtari
cloaks herself in smoke—
finds
in it a new way
of breathing. In death
she finds life,
in glasses of whiskey
her own image.
The doctors say:
She will die if she cannot sing.
So she pulls breath
like a thread from
her red heart.
One evening
she rises to the fifth
octave &
collapses.
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 debut collection, Shahr-e-jaanaan: The City of the Beloved (Tupelo Press, 2020) is a winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize. Her poetry has appeared in Poem-A-Day, Gulf Coast, Poetry Daily, and The Margins, and her translations in PBS Frontline and Words Without Borders. Adeeba has received fellowships from Kundiman and Poets House, and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan.
Photo credit: Christopher Lucka
Born in Lahore in 1992, Muhammad Sulaman is a Pakistani visual artist, specialising in the miniature form. He graduated from NCA Lahore and completed his masters in visual arts at NCA as well. He has exhibited widely in Pakistan, as well as Italy and China.
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