The Needle's Eye Poem by Sadiqullah Khan

‘I woke with this marble head in my hands;
It exhausts my elbows and I don't know where to put it down.
It was falling into the dream as I was coming out of the dream.
So our life became one and it will be very difficult for it to separate again.'
Giorgos Seferis

They were pulling a camel, through the needle's eye.
To Giorgos Seferis I wrote.
Yours is a bust and your elbow tired,
But you are not looking through the tiniest of holes.
You are not buried, trapped in the sphinx. Who
For illness would wash the alphabets of snakes
And sparrows, into the skulls and drink as potions.
The others worshiped them. Some dreamt heaven closing eyes.
The fertility of soil, determines the fruit. Sweet, sour and bitter.
You had all. When I trace the roots of the threads,
Be it the unarmed breastful of a statue
Or of statesmanship. The secretary to the Pope,
Discovered Quintilian's, Institutes, from a tower, where
The worst of criminals would not be kept for punishment.
Or Lucretius, On the nature of things, which is proverbially, godless.
In the pyramidal maze, in the line of stars and magicians,
And rapt adventurists, and pickled flesh of sun-gods,
Or earth-eaten dried bones, entombed,
Or holiness versified onto tongues, meaningless -
In cults, and absence of human reason,
My torch burns my hands and my eyes have gone visionless.

-Giorgos Seferis (Greek: Γιώργος Σεφέρης) , the pen name of Georgios Seferiades (Γεώργιος Σεφεριάδης; March 13 [O.S. February 29] 1900 - September 20,1971) , was a Greek poet-diplomat. He was one of the most important Greek poets of the 20th century, and a Nobel laureate. He was a career diplomat in the Greek Foreign Service, culminating in his appointment as Ambassador to the UK, a post which he held from 1957 to 1962.

Sadiqullah Khan
Islamabad
June 10,2014.

Blue plaque to Giorgos Seferis (George Seferis) on his house on Sloane Avenue, London SW3, England. @ Wikipedia