Poets Tending to the Aches of Empires By Shadab Hashmi

When you are broken-boned, heaped upon
the deadly alloys of power, retching
on the saffron and citruses of our own
planting, remember how good we were with
salvaging beauty, blunting edges with imagination’s
cotton kiss, remember the night-boats to villages
of authors of the past when you didn’t leave your bed,
locking tealeaves in summer lotuses that open
with the brave clove of the moon in your cup

Naming the hungers in Hangzhou

Twice-seasoned soup at dawn, along with shreds
of hot puff-pastry and steamed rice before
beginning the business of the day with
a naked quill and an innocent scroll— the
Hangzhou Tea Merchant puts the moonrise to
shame in his lifting of delicate burdens,
distilling an epoch’s hunger in his poem.
Though empire prospers, and even commoners
may eat more than thirty kinds of vegetables and
seventeen types of beans, there are aches borne of hungers.
 

The poet, an apothecary in Nishapur

pounds the finest husks, seeds, barks and roots. Soon,
the Mongol conflagration of forest and field,
library, mosque and hospital will feed
an ashen history. He wraps salves in torn
pages of poetry. The mauve blooms and leaves flicker
their last as the wind brings carrion-burning stench—
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Attar is lifted by birdsong: in remembrance
of God, hearts find serenity, the ringdove
repeats. Wings folded, she tends to the poet’s ache.

Rumi reads The Conference of the Birds

and pens: “Attar has traversed the seven cities
of Love. We are still at the turn of one
street.” An exile from Balkh to Anatolia,
the Mongol invasion forces him West—
On the way: corpses eaten by stork, kites,
porcupines. What was the text of the sweet
basil of Samarkand? What did the hoopoe
behold after a lifetime of flying
through the valleys of quest? The birds of the book
travel East, Rumi finds the ancient beloved everywhere.
 
Tomb of Al Ghazali

The rebecs, musk roses, onyx towers,
diamond-encrusted ewers are gone, as are
the artisans, the ink-and quill-crafters, translators,
navigators, perfumers, tyrants, ascetics,
and the teahouses and mosques and madrassas
where the Sufi taught how to find the Divine
without seeking ownership of piety. In the decay,
melon vines and jasmines sweeten
with the sage, gardenias run wild. In the
sunken ruins, mynahs, the irreverent pilgrims, chirrup.

 

white dog

By Shadab Zeest Hashmi

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