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How long has it been in conversation with my unconscious,
While calling me insistantly out of my slumber?
Drops of water splashing on white porcelain,
Echoing off myriad tiles through the open door.
Trying to ignore, to shut out of my head
Its counting of unfamiliar second, minute, hour.
Now pushed from the front of my mind,
The pulse of blood, the ringing in my ear.
Drip, drip, dripping, disturbing
The stillness of the dark, of the very air.
In the empty room I grasp skeletal words
As they creak to confer a description of what I hear.
Compelled to rise zombie-like from my bed,
Drawn to the disturbance source where,
My hand reaches for the tap and turns,
Turns another page even as it stops the water.
Darkness now only lingers on the light
Of coming dawn. This night is surely over.
With every step an evil war takes away the essence of soul.
The people suffer from it as it slices their endurance of soul.
The times will change, echoes in the soulful winds of faith,
Grace is never far which is in a heavenly ambiance of soul.
Piercing songs of caged birds draw silent tears in my heart,
And I carry their broken rhythm within my silence of soul.
Burn your wings, if you must, to rekindle your love affair,
As the moth drawn to love's flame full of romance of soul.
Even the mirror of my broken heart has lost its own magic,
But it still carries your marvels within its radiance of soul.
The silent pain of plucked flowers bleeds upon the hands,
That can only capture their body, not the fragrance of soul.
I leave with this hope, a radiant image; we will meet again,
Within the cycle of the spring leaping into joyance of soul.
Every word of his Ghazal prays for the peace of your heart,
Within this reflection, 'Darshan' seeks the elegance of soul.
Ask me not how I feel
I am living on my will
Lamp has no more oil now
Feed me life-saving pill
Death is a deadly stalker
Love made my life nil
I do not have nasty look
She abhors me with a zeal
It is Archi's sad plight
He is her prey and kill
I appeal you to come down like Mother Teresa
I pray you to hold a crown like Mother Teresa
Pope beatified her as the noble 'Saint of Gutters'
You may also have a noun like Mother Teresa
Come down to the lowest plain with your caring heart
Put on sari leaving gown like Mother Teresa
Sick and poor lovers solicit for your sympathy
Pray you go to down town like Mother Teresa
Do not let a lone lover die without a blissful love
Save Archi from falling down, like Mother Teresa
Inspired by the Sufi Master Mawlana Shaykh Nazim Adil al-Haqqani
A vulnerable orphan prostrates under the Dome of Provisions till eternity.
Waiting for a lift by the hand of Mercy under thy gaze of tender eternity.
One kiss from his blessed eyes revives dead cells concealed in flesh.
One stroke on the head makes limbs yearning for more till eternity.
Pollution, a means to witness the value of purity in this world's obscurity.
Truth, a hidden treasure buried beneath masks of fear in eternity.
O orphan child! You're not a true ascetic if all you desire is the fancies of Paradise.
Could the gift be dearer than the Giver of gift in this endless realm of eternity?
The lover's place is not in Heaven nor in Hell, but between the warm hands of its Beloved.
Come, listen to the glorious sound of eternity, eternity — all enraptured by Eternity.
Repetition. Monotony. The "it" in the first line of "The Dripping Tap" could refer to a number of repetitive events that tap tap on the trapdoor to the unconscious. That tapping on our subliminal faculties is surely one source of poetry, as it is the source of this poem. One could argue that monorhyme (qafiya) and radif in ghazals are examples of repetitive events that may well also, when well-deployed, tap tap tap on the reader's unconscious, rousing the imagination from its slumber. This ghazal, of course, uses microrhyme on "r," the "r" that ends a syllable, phonetically different from the "r" that begins a syllable, a soft, easy "r-colored schwa," articulated in the center of the mouth. (Of course, readers whose English is "r-less" will sound this poem much differently.
We move by contrasts and live in conflicts. The outer war is a reflection of the inner, many traditions would assure us. Sukhdarshan Dhaliwal's ghazal moves between the contraries of violence-loss-pain and joy. Note that each qafiya is a word laden with positive connotations, each turn of sorrow culminating in an affirmation.
Beyond the horizon of the ordinary live figures like Mother Teresa. Many of us, like Archi, beseech this figure to "come down," be an avatar for us of redeeming love. But Ramkrishna Das's "Ghazal 3" does not beseech Mother Teresa: Archi beseeches "you," who seems to be the heartless, rejecting lover whom we've already met in Ghazal 2.
Alas! A Google search for "avatar" produces many hits relating to James Cameron's movie, to the "Airbender" series, and to "avatars" in computer apps like Second Life. One has to go several pages in to find a definition of "avatar" which gives the meaning which I intend here.
In the strict traditional form of the ghazal, each line must have the same meter. There's usually an assumption that the lines are long also. This issue presents extremes in line length: Ramkrishna Das's very brief lines in "Ghazal 2" and N. K. Naqshbandi-Haqqani's long lines in "Eternal Attraction." From my viewpoint, the success of a ghazal in English doesn't depend so much on line-length or strict meter as on the poet's skill in writing lines of a length and meter that fit the poem's themes. There are two extreme positions on how form relates to content: one is that the form of a poem is entirely separate from its content and the theme could be equally well expressed in a variety of forms. The other extreme is that form and content are identical — "form is never more than an extension of content," as Charles Olson quoted Robert Creeley. In this view, any change in form changes the content. My own view falls closer to the Olson/Creeley pole than to the dualistic pole, and yet poets revise, rewrite, alter form in pursuit of the content that they sense is possible.
I believe I'll take this form/content discussion to my blog. Meanwhile, enjoy these ghazals!