Boundless Honor Xlii Poem by Sadiqullah Khan

You have spent millennia you have been
The king's escort. The thousand and one nights
Had their invention, and paradise is a utopia
Of boundless honor, robes and ceremonials.

Chess was invented out of famine,
When they would be served with meals on alternate
Days. In between they played chess, and these days
The lesser variant of a Ludo, played by the cap wearing tribes
Under apple trees. Ah! The dread of times -

Story-teller politicians and awe-struck audience
The privileged and the unprivileged,
This is war of nerves. Those in the wings are safe
Who tweet like an owl and others starved for happiness,
Mingle in a state direly needing. Those who escaped drowning.

Dirt, cavalcades of excessive bounty
Schools need to be limed, when the legions of donkeys leave,
Round helmets, skinned and their commandant claimed
More originality than assigned. His future lies in ‘service'.

Drawn lines in transparent water of flood,
The magnitude of theft is unbelievable, therefore
It must be taken as true. Headless nails once driven in
Cannot be pulled out. Wait for the rust to break them out.

These efforts are intangible
The awaited sufferings are breaking souls,
Abandoned homes. This earth has no songs, at war with itself.
On the big canvas the resemblance is a void space,
Or ant-ridden carcass, a place of worship of statues, living
Breathing, sitting and standing. They come and go.

Nature is solace for us.
Lucky are the cemetery dwellers,
Time is running its scores with you, you homeless, poor
Time is luxury spent; they measure it by their scale.

This is their country, theirs alone
So do not take it to your heart, and when you do it
You add miseries, misfortunes to yourself.
The breathing space is too narrow, the arbiters too weak
Without scruples, to let an honorable escape, an exit.
But that requires a civic sense, unlike sub-continental dramas
Of three hundred episodes, albeit a Samuel Becket's play's catharsis.

Sadiqullah Khan
Islamabad
September 18,2014.