Prelude

Of fancy, when thy ruby blood-drop stains

The tulip red, and rises insurgent

To the supreme power of nature and regains,

Eternal providence: O’ refulgent –

O’ Zephyr, ay, thou art pernicious, dead,

And thine largesse roams the desert free;

My orient nods within the narcissus’ bed:

Thine petalled allurement and ecstasy!

Startus of the dreams of peasant’s damsel

Lo! Floating in the horizontal sheet;

As Delos bids to Cyclades farewell;

And Zeus, then manures the passion sweet

There, poesy dances like a whirling star

Contrary runs the forlorn world of past

And throbbing drowse of gazelles doth go far,

Thus fancy brings the word of past;

From thy orchard, let me pluck asphodel –

And put that in assay of immortality;

Just to listen, the ‘naked’, the ‘invisible’ –

That dextrous fiddler’s carol, calm and free.

Streamlet of a melody brings to heart,

Intuition, passion, longing’s flare and muse;

Springs the carol in amour of art,

And makes the cosmos sunk in abstruse;

Beyond the opaque poppy, lives a soul,

Who longeth for a pretty ‘alter ego’ –

Topsy turvy makes the world of fair, foul:

In goblet of ‘self’ pours the wine of ‘No’.

Though it seems in lower tract of prairie,

Hermes keeps the opiate rod, prevalent

Ay the ‘No’, yet hath no word of prithie!

No mighty, no mosque, none is here to bent:

World is then benumbed, with that opiate rod,

Eclipsed moon of love soars the firmament –

Free from Divinity, buxom is the clod;

Mortal doth not know, where he is sent

Call El Dorado, but for a rebel

’gainst the laws, Empyrean of the Lord

Throbbing heart of passion hath lost its spell,

Nymph of tumult’s vintage-wild; Mighty God!

Ergo, for the lament, I pray for thee,

‘Semper idem’ mounts, song of wailing heart,

In my consciousness, burns splutteringly,

Pierces ‘Intellect’ with a hurling dart –

For thine love, in tyrannous flood of Time,

Makes the vessel trembling from stem to stern,

Essence of cosmos, verse of subtle rhyme;

Soul of the Lord, Arabian; Gabriel’s passion, burn:

Ay for intuition, with fervour that glows,

Statuette of marble, heart of hard flint;

Meteor-like inspiration, then stows –

Reluctance and Meeting in the same glint:

Stimulant for ‘Movement of Islam’, let it be –

This book, that I brought from the spheres beyond,

Treatise; an Ode on Celestial Divinity –

But for Terrenity, it is intuition’s bond!

To the buoyant of Saracens like glaring spark,

– Calyxes of roses betwixt hill and lake

In thy heap of ashes, sable, cold and dark;

Of the ruby blood-drop; Javed Thus Spake –

Courtesy: The Pakistan Review (1969)