You Nameless One Poem by Sadiqullah Khan

With every blow on the chisel head,
You are the stone cutter, obstinate
Every broken piece, as sharp as shrapnel,
Is the bread of your child, is soaked
By a longer night's separation and lonely morn.

What doth make you do this?
But the love you espouse, and the hardened,
Warted skin of your hand, or a sleepless night.

Un-rhythmic, for you might have made,
Someone like the master, who, on tapping on gold
Had with ecstatic steps covered the distance,
Across the street.

Might you have not been doing anything,
How responsible, and born in a soft lap,
By this mid-hour, of the night, what makes you work,
So hard, don't you need rest? But again, you are driven,
To extract water from the earth's depth, and earn-
Just a living, and could let go, be more intelligible.

And I may not provoke you by asking
Or telling you that you are the proletariat,
Or your wage, and make you ‘conscious',
Tell you to rise, because the risen have died long ago.
You may only know the ‘minimum wage'
Passed by the Parliament or wait indefinitely,
Through generations. You, your son and his son and so on.

You nameless one, what a glorious living thee live!

-To a laborer who is working at midnight to dig a well of water opposite my window.

Sadiqullah Khan
Islamabad
June 24,2014.

The Allegory of Science, Labor, and Art. @ The New School Frescoes of José Clemente Orozco