Friday, December 1, 2023

Rahat Kurd : Three poems

 


In heart and vitals; in chest, ribs, and eyes

Passion, where does your blaze not burn?

Munni Bai Hijab, 19th century Urdu poet  

 

Musculo-Skeletal Ghazal


Woman at fifty, uncertain of face, weary bones clamour for attention
Shamed was the age to grant women life who only forswore attention 

Inflamed by age, or empathy? Rasp of lung, peril of hip, shoulder, wrist —
After your searing wit, Munni Bai, could my ghazal merit your attention?

To bridge a rift that steep, your brain must strive for symmetry
Inimical visions possessing each eye reconcile in your attention

Blood, border, cult of false belonging, shut your doors against me
I belong to rivers of language, overflowing where I pour attention

More rare, more strange, more sustaining, more obdurate than love
This will to live won’t leave me since I briefly held your attention

To die in the arms of the poem might be the devout translator’s prayer
What better homage than to fall between lines that won your attention?

 

 

Twenty Seventeen Ghazal

True rebellion frees just that woman laughter reminds of money.
My nation would arm freedom fighters with that kind of money.  

You cannot, cold Accounts Receivable zeroes, take from me
Anything that I will more willingly part withal, except that kind of money.

Threadbare, per poetic tradition, I roam planets and galaxies —
My best work turns cartwheels through the puny mind of money. 

In coastal quake, felled tower glass would crush us splinter-bloody.
Wolf at the door; views to die for; give us our daily grind for money.

Let scarcity swindle Rahat; let false economy fleece her to the skin.
She waxes rich with rhyme. They chew the hard prose rind of money.

 

 

Ghazal by Munni Bai Hijab*

No power can describe or imagine the state of Hijab!
Whose listeners’ tears don’t fall – hers is not that story

In heart and vitals; in chest, ribs, and eyes
Passion, where does your blaze not burn?

You slay everyone who sighs for you – it’s alarming
You’re still convinced there are no true lovers here

Don’t ask about my sorrow – what could I tell you?
I lost the path to the garden. Of home I have no memory

Against your lack of pity, I too would buy some provision 
If only hearts were for sale in the market of fate

Why do they slander the woman they vex and torment?
They must believe there is no tongue in my mouth

That one – and he comes to my house as he wills!
Modesty covers my head but no sky shelters me

 

Translated from the Urdu by Rahat Kurd

 

 

*Munni Bai ‘Hijab’ (her takhallus, or pen name) was born in Kolkata in the 19th century and wrote in the classical ghazal form in Urdu. I was captivated by this ghazal’s embodied emotional directness and the wryness of its refrain (‘Nahiñ...nahiñ...nahiñ’ or ‘there isn’t...there isn’t...there isn’t’), relieving its otherwise melancholic mood. Literary scholars and multiple textual sources agree that Hijab was a tawa’if, (an Urdu term unsatisfactorily if conventionally translated as ‘courtesan’) who met, loved, and corresponded with the celebrated poet Dagh Dehlvi (1831-1905). Only this bare sketch of her life and a scant number of her poems have survived either the careless inattentions of the men who presided over Urdu-language poetry and poetics, or the erasures and thefts of colonial British rule.

 

 

 

 

Rahat Kurd is at work on a prose memoir and a poetry collection. Her essay “Elegiac Moods: Letters to Agha Shahid Ali” appears in the anthology river in an ocean: essays on translation, edited by Nuzhat Abbas (Trace Press, 2023). She is co-author with Sumayya Syed of The City That Is Leaving Forever: Kashmiri Letters (Non-fiction, Talonbooks, 2021) and author of COSMOPHILIA (Poems, Talonbooks, 2015).