AGHA SHAHID ALI
Ghazal
-for Hayden Carruth
The Beloved will leave you behind from the start.
Light is difficult: one must be blind from the start.
You begin to feel better when the clocks are set back?
Child
if
northern darkness-so
defined from the start.
Between two snow-heavy boughs, perhaps a bright star?
Or in one sparkling many stars combined from the start?
Ontological episode? God doesn't care.
"That is why he exists," you divined from the start.
Solomon's throne was a toy, his judgment mere talk–
Only our sins must be enshrined from the start.
Poet, tell me again how the white heron rises.
For the spirit, they say, is confined from the start.
To
What is mind?
we swiftly answer 0,
no matter!
Those who know matter never mind from the start.
Will the middle class give up its white devotions?
Feed their infants cayenne and tamarind from the start.
I am mere dust. The desert hides itself in me.
Against me the ocean has reclined from the start.
Who but Satan can know God's sorrow in Heaven?
God longs for
the
lover He undermined from the start.
"But I / am here in this real life / that I was given...."
To what else should we be resigned from the start?
You have dwelt at the root of a scream forever–
The Forever Shahid's countersigned from the start.
