Her absence is a language
in which you write a song.
At night when your hand leaves the
door ajar,
your heart becomes a tongue
that recites the Quran in silence.
He is a linguist of silence –
an artisan of longing.
All the grammarians have lost
their chance with him,
silence is his God!
She descends on me like a revelation
as the universe looks at me in awe.
My heart is a mountain
the one Moses saw burn to ash.
Grieving, I burnt all the languages of the world.
What remained of that colossal wreck
she wore as kohl in her dark eyes.
Note from the poet:
Imru’ al-Qais, the sixth-century poet of pre-Islamic Arabian, is remembered by the Arab rhetoricians as an early master of iltifāt, “turning” – the sudden swerve of a voice between “you,” “he” and “I.” This technique is employed deliberately as a psychological necessity to manage a rush of grief from consuming the bard and making it universal. The poem above follows Imru’ al-Qais’s turning of the speaker through all three.
I begin by speaking to myself as “you,” then step further back and see myself as “he,” the linguist of silence. Only in the last stanzas am I able to say “I.”
While writing this poem I was gripped by a certain absence which was coupled with the idea of language. What holds the poem together is her: Her absence opens the poem in its own language; she descends, and she closes the poem.
The ending comes from the event at Mount Tur – the mountain could not bear God’s revelation to Moses, and from our Urdu/Persian tradition of Surma-e-Tur, the kohl said to be made from that mountain’s dust. My heart is that mountain. Her presence burns it, and what is left becomes her adornment.
Hamza Mudassir is a Pakistani poet and scholar deeply embedded in the high sensibility of South Asian poetic culture and tradition. Drawing from the intersection of literature, culture, and mythology, his work bridges Sufi mysticism and theological imagination. With a background in English Literature, he writes and creates in the spaces between language and silence. He can be found on instagram at @hamythos.
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