I Am A River, Come Drift With Me Poem by Naseer Ahmed Nasir

O shorelines! What are you looking at, just standing there
Come drift with me
The stillness of the centuries flows with me
You come along too
my companions, from the day I was born
You are the twins
that never embrace each other
You think I am the reason for that!
How wrong you are
O you, gazing each other from afar!
It is just me
who unites the travelers coming to your door
from the far off lands
and lets the boats wade across
How brutally they tear apart my bust
Come, rub your murky, sandy torsos against my waves
Get to know the times full of pleasure
from my dampness and softness
My caress is the same for all those who touch me
I do not make any distinction between left and right

Come drift with me!
I pass through the cities and the countries
The borders do not block my passage
From my waters, the great love stories come into being
So many bridges are hanging over me
So many faiths take a dip into me
The civilizations commit suicide, when I am dead
I am the keeper of the geography
and an eye witness to the history
I keep on flowing full of
books turned to ashes, dead bodies torn apart
and all the grime of the settlements
When I get filled up to the brinks
I start oozing out of the eyes of the poets and their poems
I am a living fossil
I am the Sindhu, I am the Danube
But when I get transformed into the Tigris and the Euphrates
I become an infinite metaphor of the thirst
I don't have a single name
I am a watery traveler of the time
and travel across the rocky terrains under different names
For me, to halt is to die
I cannot be preserved in any museum
and can't be embodied in some memento
The echoes of the sorrows hidden in my riverbed
are heard in the silent trails like the wafts
and the hums of my songs
resonate in the arched labyrinths of the ancient sacred places
and the hearts of dervishes clad in Pashmina
and the dwellers of the seminaries

O my eternal guardians!
Be at ease drifting with me
I fear no threat from anyone
except, the torrential rains
that fill me up with rage sometimes
and I get out of your protective bounds
to get to the dwellings, to the fields, to the meadows
and to the low-lying plains
and inundate them along with you
But, with the resurgence of the sunlight
I get back to my path
and you take me back into your protective custody
O legendary valiants! I do not doubt your loyalty
You fall into me, even if you are cut into pieces through erosion

O fellow drifters!
Passing through the tall green mountains,
the old wrinkled plateaus,
the thick forests, the plains,
and the sandy deserts
I always fall into the salty ocean
where the saline winds welcome me with open arms
and the sweetness of my waters
gets transformed into a lathery bitterness
And the two of you, the ever separated, the eternally parted
let me embrace the ocean
and stand erect in a perpetual farewell posture

But I can see now
time after time, year after year
my water level is receding
and my glucose level is getting to a dangerous low
Flowing ceaselessly, my flow has started gasping
and I've started getting parched before even I get to the ocean
and yet at some places
the global warming
has forced me to go underground
and even you two
immersed deep into the thoughts of
the sailors, the fishermen and the fish
are drifting away from me day by day

O dwellers of the waters! My path is strange
Always downwards from the above
Wish I could get to the sky someday
I would have become a rainbow
passing through the clouds
and you would have gotten drenched in the colors
along with me
Beyond the clouds, much beyond
after passing through the azure voids up there
we could have reached a world
free of this pollution, this suffocation,
this fishnet of human desires
Where we could breathe freely
Where I would have kept on running without any hindrances
and would have kept on flowing
like omnipresent time!

Original poem in Urdu by Naseer Ahmed Nasir
English translation by Kamran Awan