A Winter Poem by Sadiqullah Khan

Don’t call my indictments. There in remote history
Fabled, and to the rescuer, a woman held by pirates
On the Arabian Sea, cried ‘help’ and it reached the
Young General, Bin Qasim, so he invaded the Indus.
On the shores, of the marshed landscape, where
The now extinct Bengal tigers lived,
“Millions of babies in pain
Millions of mothers in rain
Millions of brothers in woe
Millions of children nowhere to go”
This was sung by Bob Dylan, and the 152 lines long poem,
Written by Allen Gingsberg, in nineteen seventy one.
The Voices, saw a Palestinian girl
“Dancing under the moon” mixing tragic with the romantic.

The rampantness of the No, Nyet, Nothing and Nops
This is not philosophic pessimism or Sartorian nihilistic
Existentialism. This is no –ism.
This –ism is the Nebraska University think-tank’s creed
Teaching holy war, Reagan the actor, a military man,
The dictator, and a Bear, workaholic, taking power-naps.
This was the might of dollar, ‘In whom we trust’
Blood thirsty enemies, and the mealy-mouthed Chinese
The robed heads of Excellencies, and ‘general commons’.

Hunger, would drive men to the camps, where guns
Were provided like sticks, cheaper than pens, and
Bullets like rounded stones for catapults. A warrior nation:
Russians had come to their motherland, and some ‘unknowns’
Would rape their women at night, howling like wolves
On the morning prayers, heads bent, their hands to deity
So they fought a war, and were killed in thousands.

That is no news, a girl with Anglo looks, catching eyes
Or a one photographed for National Geographic;
Or a creed of unemployed and employed to steal and rob
The tonnage of wheat and brown rice coming from ‘The Free World’.
The one, praising the Almighty, on the border, for having won
A war. And having fed themselves, their cronies, and friends.

You ‘Go There’ or not. Whether you are There or not.
They make a virtue of fertility rite, a giving hand, they know not
Blue eyed, black eyed, either gender, old and young
Their hands extended. Their soil brazen, they are a cattle
In an arid field, horses unsaddled, cows uncovered
They live under the blue emblem of the United Nations
For them, the symbol of peace is not a dove, but a hungry vulture.

-On Jalozai Refugee Camp Nowshera.

Sadiqullah Khan
Peshawar
December 14,2013.

Love Among the Ruins by Edward Burne Jones @ The Kissed Mouth