Ghazal (The Flight)

By Sumera Saleem

The blessed endures your grace, the unfavored takes flight.

Charmed by your glances are braves, only a coward takes flight.

 

Love wants its hidden treasure revealed to the beloved, in Night-

Kissed journey, Buraaq rides the wind, the angel take flight.

 

I lose day after day like a tree losing leaves in the autumn,

With the wings of days and nights, time silently takes flight.

 

Zafar¹ strews elegies into the rosary, cuffed around his wrist.

Words, crowned with grief, let the wingless bird take flight.

 

Bano² died in her father’s shrine, it is enshrined in books.

Keeping many under smudged time, history too takes flight.

 

Royal palaces become jails, harems irrevered by travelled dogma

Leaving the garden fixed with snares, royal birds take flight.

 

Dark night is ensnared in the bosom of thick feathery clouds.

Winged with hope, soaring up the sky my fancies take flight.

 

Oceanic ink in my eyes dried up, and scrolls left blank, untouched.

Silence writes on my soul your name, and words take flight.

 

To torch civility, avarice prowled our land of gold, history

Crumbled into the closet of blood and noble Empire takes flight.

 

Abraham puts birds pieces, interspersed, on the hill for a miracle!

Graced with divine unity, clothing flesh they briskly take flight.

 

Some cling to the ground like ants, sight buried in deep ditches,

Eximious ones, to touch the heights of truth, curiously take flight.

 

“Glory to Lord”³, settles on fragrant breeze of each morning.

Twittering new dawn in mysterious songs, all birds take flight.

 

Risen out of the dust as a bird, Jesus turns: dead to life, grief

to heal, then his wings upto heaven and secretly takes flight.

 

¹The Moghul emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar

²Gul Bano, daughter of Mirza Dara Bakht, the former crown prince of Bahadur Shah.

³The translation of “Alhamdulillah”, a prayer in Arabic

 

Sumera Saleem is a lecturer in the Department of English Language and Literature, the University of Sargodha, Pakistan. She has published poems in National and International literary magazines.