Friends, for years I sang you

Songs of love,

Weaving dreams of moons, springs, and stars,

Adorning chambers of desire.

I am your poet.

Each time I came

I brought a new love song.

But now I stand in tattered clothes,

Coated with the road’s dust.

Songs from my sitar are choked,

Their melody drowned in din,

Their notes sobbing.

.

I am your singer, not a song,

But the cause of songs.

You’ve burned to ashes the songs’ cause.

I—stare at corpses

Holding my splintered sitar.

Death’s horrors dance about me,

For the animal in man is loose.

Blood hungry barbarians

Opening red-stained jaws

Growl an urge for blood.

The child trembles at his mother’s breast;

Chastity stands wretched, nude.

Cries canopy space,

And in this rape,

In this churning of fire and blood,

I wander from house to house

With my begging bowl and basket of songs.

.

Give me alms of civilization, of peace—

Give me the notes for my song, 

Give me the melody, my pipe.

For years I sang you

Songs of rebellion and revolt.

In the shadows of the strangers’ rule 

I roused your limp emotions

And stopped them from making your heads an offering.

I awaited the morning

When the country’s soul would be free.

.

 

~~~

.

Today, the chains of bondage are smashed;

Air and oceans, houses and balconies

Are free from the shadow of their blighted flag,

Flags that spread only night.

New fields stand anxious to yield gold,

Valleys eager to flutter with growth;

Mountains’ chests, pent up, are ready to burst. 

Stones and brick, once dreamless, now awake 

And glitter with dreams of use.

Dreams, dreams of valleys, hills, of fields,

Of women and of girls—

.

But wait. As they all spread their hands for alms, 

Give them alms of civilization, of peace.

Give the mother color in her lips;

To the child, joy,

To the country’s soul, life;

To me, my art, my notes,

My melody, my pipe.

Today, the sky is a beggar,

And to this begging sky

I lift my begging basket of songs.

.

I wander from house to house—

Give me my sitar.

I am your singer; whenever I come

I will bring you a new song.

.

AIR Delhi  ∙  11 September 1947

.
      With M. H. K Qureshi

.

From: Talk̲h̲iyān̲ (Bitternesses). Dihlī: Panjābī Pustak Bhanḍār, 1963. pp. 159 – 64

Āj  is quoted in full in Urdu Poetry, 1935-1970