The Blind Poet Poem by Sadiqullah Khan

Your blind interlocutions, how often
I wondered what if, having not seen you!
For like a horse’s eye-cup, straightened
Or an enemy of the empire like a brother
Blinded and sent to the sanct land, who would
After the punishment afflicted proclaim,
“Now between me and you only exist the holy book”.

I could have seen with my blinded eye,
Out of the contextual debris, framing my focus
As if my pupil dilated from the intoxicant, -inebriated.
I watched the moon descend on the roof, and dew rain
From below, on a path resplendent like a chess-board
Of life. Although I did not defeat extinction into vapor,
Or poured out the ocean into space, nor did I,
Drink river of your beauty, a blissful down-pour
From the upturned chin, from the edge of your lip.

I could have breathed eternity from the warmth,
From the aroma betwixt the blooming bosoms, a sad
Inhalation like from the damp earth filled with wild mushrooms,
Like spice sprinkled and the color of saffron, adoring the bunch
Of hair, half done into the air, half flown for the butterfly’s
Residue’s of yellow color, and speaking eyes, and like
Cypress shifts with lengths, your neck, tapering on a Greek
Sculpture’s shoulders, de-handed, the satin slipping down
The curve, exposing, alas, a wild dream, not oft seen.
With open eyes, not even dreamed, in the blind poet’s imagination.

I rub the palms, at the end of a ritual dance,
Is it something that my paranoia ended, with the sooth
On the beads you wear, around the ankle, or a wrist
Readily adroit, asking a razor cut, a kiss from my sanguine
Vision, though darkened, but gone from my eye, like a thirty
Year’s nova’s death, reaching us now, and the remaining
Stream of light traveling from the outer space,
On a lens that is fixed in the heart, in the inner cosmos
Where your star resides, where, your sun alone rises to the
Morning bliss, and sets, to the melancholy of the evening
Covering the long distance between here and there,
Between the first ray of the sun, and the night which sets,
And the fresh breeze of air, I drank upon, last night
In your immense memory, -so the ordinary one-
You are the trivialest object of a long and short affinity.

Such is magnitude of longing that I, the poet of hazy ideas,
Stands a longing prostration of a void ownership
Of your embrace, between your arms, and my hands measuring
The heavier bottom, and rubbing cheek to cheek, kissing
Your lips, ‘like to the brim, the cup from across the end of horizon’.
But still, after all these happenings we would term
As life, incongruous, ingenious, sans a mad moment
And still the terrible demise of sliding from our hands, to some
Void, distant, beyond comprehension, expanded, seventy thousand
Times, deep, like some oppressed luxury, some abusive
Altercation of real, some desire, which even filled,
Shall always remain empty, shall always be as blind as me,
Shall always be as vacant, as my love for you, or an indifference.

We are clinging on the hopeless nature, a created, self
Larger than ourselves, larger than the breathe we take,
Or taste of the cuisine we hold, a gastronomical exercise
Daily waking up to the chirping of words, words
Drunk, simulated flowing through our brain, coming, going
Without discernment, like having been stoned to it,
Like having been, stormed through it, into a fence like
Partition. Into some absurdity, bemoaning into this living.

Sadiqullah Khan
Islamabad
May 15,2014.

Telling Homer’s Tales @ Wikimedia Commons