There Had Been Such A House Poem by Muhammad Shanazar

There had been such a house
Among other ones,
Where loneliness sipped me drop by drop,
We used to spend our dark nights
In the burning dream like lanterns
And cumbersome days
Suffocated and hefty like mountains,
Cast them in the lap of evening,
Everyday,
Dreams of good times,
Sometimes entered into without any knock at the heart,
And we put down lashes upon the drowsy eyes,
And were scared,
Even of the soft rustles of wind.

From the door of the house,
Stretched to the bend of street
The heart breaking silence,
Mud-coated faces,
Desires like departed barks of the trees,
Eyes wrapped in the blanket of seclusion,
Surrounded by scorching sunlight of noon,
These were the assets of life,
But a dream made the heart and sight co-disposed,
Who regarded whom, to be the companion,
We just felt everything was well acquainted

Your conversing eyes,
Redness of my name in the tips of your fingers,
Bouquets of roses and cestrum,
Everything seemed to me my own.
Then I reached your eyes
Flowing in the flow of the tale,
From your eves to my morns
There was nothing
But the scent of the flowers,
Amid them was the world of my dreams,
And in this world
Breathed the time of your love

Loitering alone in the streets of bygone age,
Time doesn’t stand by someone forever,
It is shrewd like a money-grubber,
It changes possibilities into impossibilities
And impossibilities into possibilities,
It breaks brimming bowls of grief-stricken eyes.

Who knew
How many times I wished
To be festooned into your eyes like kajal
But now I think,
It was sufficient for me,
A whim-like reality,
And the scent of a few flowers


Written by Ayub Khawar
Translated by Muhammad Shanazar