Agha Shahid Ali Poems

Those intervals
between the day’s
five calls to prayer
...

Swear by the olive in the God-kissed land—
There is no sugar in the promised land.

Why must the bars turn neon now when, Love,
I’m already drunk in your capitalist land?
...

The rain dissolves its liquid bones
Humming the wind, the lightning grazes
the skin. A cloud descends :
My eye is vapour, this, the dream's downpour
...

Nostalgic for Baba's youth,
I make you return
his wasted generation:
...

You who will find the dark fossils of paisleys
one afternoon on the peaks of Zabarvan -
Trader from an ancient market of the future,
...

(In Lenox Hill Hospital, after surgery,
my mother said the sirens sounded like the
elephants of Mihiragula when his men drove
them off cliffs in the Pir Panjal Range.)
...

on the wall the dense ivy of executions
—ZBIGNIEW HERBERT
We shall meet again, in Srinagar,
by the gates of the Villa of Peace,
...

"Each ray of sunshine is seven minutes old,"
Serge told me in New York one December night.

"So when I look at the sky, I see the past?"
"Yes, Yes,' he said. "especially on a clear day."
...

1
Efficient as Fate,
each eye a storm trooper,
...