City Of The Saints Poem by Usman Hanif

Those were the times
In clay, humans were buried
And now the soil is extinct
The clay has been finished
Where to bury them?
To dig out our graves;
No place is left

You walk above me
On the corpse floor
The mosaic has been buried
Under our own uproar

I still imagine your existence
How odd would it look?
You would be strolling
Amongst ourselves, all dead
Hah! Like sand blowing;
In the desert of sand

You are our own memento
Stop there and listen
To my voice, my grave
My friends, all the saints...

All around is death plague
Aye! The saints are rotting
Would they be resurrected?
But why am I asking
Am I a saint?

I was a saint
In the city of saints
We ate the flesh and bones
And the ale of blood to drink
We needed religion no more
And we kept on drinking

The rights were given to them
The outlaws preached the religion
They told us the ways;
To spill blood, to brew ale
We were so virtuous;
Those beasts feared from us

When the saints died away
We needed not to bury them
The earth roared at our acts
Storms blew at our necks
But after all we were saints
And saints are always blest

No one heard the earth
It kept on crying nonstop
And abruptly the cries died
A silent storm, burning inside...
And then the earth trembled
The dust storm started
And the earth consumed itself

To mourn at the demise of earth
No one was left, outlaws neither
We were celebrating there, dead
How serene was our death!


Our funeral was celebrated
And God buried the earth
We were the soil
And earth was the corpse...

03-03-2008