Frozenness Poem by Muhammad Shanazar

No sound is heard except
Rustling of numerous ants
Creeping on the cold floor.
They make rounds from floor to wall,
Time and again, they are impatient,
In search of something unknown to me.

Whatever the sound emerges,
That is the sound of silences striking,
Against ebb and flow of breaths
Which fades away by and by amid
the frozen mountains of silences.


Strange are these days,
Monotonous,
Sans colours, san light and sans sense,
And evening are exhausted,
Sad, melancholic and fretful.

Only sometimes,
On the dark windows of passions,
Knocks steadily Komal Ghandhar
Of your memories,
And the night turning into dreams,
Begins to tell the tales of Hatam Tai,
The melodies of Pukhraj,
Song of Begum Akhtar,
And the night becomes exhausted,
In the dim light of fluttering lamps,
Waiting for some golden morn.


And sometimes there happens nothing,
In unidentified, displaced, silent
And dark system of my universe,
Perhaps emergence of the dawn
Is not possible in the confined sable sky.

Written by Jagdish Prakash
Translated by Muhammad Shanazar