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).