English Ghazal

The Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali wrote in a number of forms. He attempted to adapt the Urdu ghazal into English. A short piece which he wrote on the ghazal form is here. I usually feel that English ghazals are a travesty of the original form - good Urdu ghazals are so succinct, rich in sound, metre, allusion. The usual problem of translation. But I thought this worked well as a poem - from poets.org.

(Completely irrelevant: I wonder if the repeated phrase, 'even the rain,' comes from the e. e. cummings poem which contains the line 'not even the rain has such small hands.' In Hannah and Her Sisters, Michael Caine used it to good effect on Barbara Hershey. It's a lovely short poem which has no connection I could see to this one.)

Even the Rain


What will suffice for a true-love knot? Even the rain?
But he has bought grief's lottery, bought even the rain.

"our glosses / wanting in this world" "Can you remember?"
Anyone! "when we thought / the poets taught" even the rain?

After we died--That was it!--God left us in the dark.
And as we forgot the dark, we forgot even the rain.

Drought was over. Where was I? Drinks were on the house.
For mixers, my love, you'd poured--what?--even the rain.

Of this pear-shaped orange's perfumed twist, I will say:
Extract Vermouth from the bergamot, even the rain.

How did the Enemy love you--with earth? air? and fire?
He held just one thing back till he got even: the rain.

This is God's site for a new house of executions?
You swear by the Bible, Despot, even the rain?

After the bones--those flowers--this was found in the urn:
The lost river, ashes from the ghat, even the rain.

What was I to prophesy if not the end of the world?
A salt pillar for the lonely lot, even the rain.

-- Agha Shahid Ali


I was walking down a narrow Karachi street, looking at the market stalls and the crowds, when I heard for the first time Mir Taki Mir’s ghazal, “Look, is it a heart or a soul, from which something smoke-like is rising? Whose heart is smouldering there?” The singer’s voice rose above the clamour like a wisp of smoke, but I heard it anyway and said, “What was that?”