Personal
Friends
(Advice to my Children)
M.A.R. Habib
Few things will hurt you more
Than the envy of old friends.
Sometimes, their silence will reach you
Across vast oceans. You will hear it, weighing
In your own voice, asking why: why
Is there time for all the distractions the world delivers
But not for a word of concern.
Sometimes their very praise will
Hurt:“You must have been practising,” or
“You are definitely better than before,”as if you needed pity;
Any success will hurt them, deeply:
They will not forgive you easily:
They will need to pity.
They will need to speak.
Sometimes their anger will brood for years:
A joke or insult long forgotten – you thought –
Will return in deep disguise
As a snub, a lack of mention, a deliberate
Stalling of affection, a dinner party without
You, a vote placed
Elsewhere.
And if you should ever have a friend
Who outshines you:
Do not damn yourself
With faint praise of her.
Let her shining warm your heart
And bring smiling to your deepest self.
Do not begrudge her the tiny dazzling
In which she danced;
Share that moment, let it live in you both,
Before it dies forever
In the ordinariness which drowns us all.
To Hishaam
In Karate Class, October 26, 2001
M.A.R. Habib
That eye you show me, as we are stretched upon the floor,
Our secret gaze to each other;
I see myself in your eye,
Wrapped in the deepest love I have ever known
A love you never reflect upon
Or speak,
Love which shines, dazzling,
From your deepest eyes.
Everest
M.A.R. Habib
Brooding.
Like a lonely god,
Too high for the world, reaching
Into the cloudless beyond.
Frozen in your own eternity, beyond
Mere heroism.
Sublime.
Human Reason – mantled in thought’s long past –
Crouches against such height, old in its endeavour.
I can face you not in your whiteness which blinds the sunrise;
Nor in the harsh cold murmuring on your slopes;
Only through the dimming mediation of machines:
The mighty aircraft that bears me above your clouds;
The camera through which I capture you, holding you
Prisoner in my imagination, a trophy commemorating a false triumph,
A feeble regent of actuality, manipulable, reproducing you without shame
Disseminating you at my pleasure: god, man, hero.
In awe.
I stand, as you rise above night, black cloud
Sustained against your silver peak
Return
M.A.R. Habib
The moon turned over Hindustan,
A foreigner wept:
“Consider, Lady Moon, with a queen’s sobriety
The poet, stood on this untilled soil
Watching your wilful promise
Steal across the sky;
He, in palaces, has known your bliss;
Has sung of your magic in his kiss.
Now, as you turn over Hindustan,
Where can you go?
All above is spread an ancient night;
Great fortresses guard the sleeping past;
Your palaces echo no more
With dignity of imperial claims;
The pearls that behung your walls
Are all gone, stolen;
The anguish of an imprisoned king, his
Royal gaze across a narrow lake toward sunlight:
All locked in the stone temples
Of your history.
I have seen the foreign faces
Drenched in the colour of my own conscience:
Long, regretful plains, sinking
In their indolent richness:
My poor city with its stallkeepers
Crawling towards dawn,
Your unending labour wearies me.
What, Simaitha, was in your cold Greek heart
When Delphis’ lips left you?
Consider, Lady Moon, the warriors
Once banqueting on this silken soil;
The “maiden” moving through poets’ verses,
Pouring wine into their dreams:
Her silhouette is stilled in your light.
Who is this beautiful woman
Who pays me an homage of kinship;
What scent hangs wild, like flowers, from her hair;
I am dulled in images of the world
Fed from creation’s sleep.
She, who whispered to me
Her history
Has fallen out of your
Design;
I cannot help but smile for her,
For us, who ventured to spoil
The unlittered clarity of the old vision:
Consider, Lady Moon, when I shall have lost her.
Queen Moon, you upon whom
Kings have thrown their gaze,
Look now upon a pilgrim’s homeless way.
I wonder what the imam thinks beneath his Arabic
Where time has taught the tongue to sing
Faster than the heart can follow;
I have knelt before each doctrine
Voiced from your past; I have washed my feet
In your pools, amid your gardens,
I have felt the edge of deceit
Slide along the moment of each act.
Consider, Lay Moon,
My Hindustan:
The false gods who wait over her,
As you turn toward the Western world:
Consider, Lady Moon, whence came my love.
To a Secular Cynic
M.A.R. Habib
You think you are modern.
You think you are tolerant, humane, enlightened
Beyond the benighted reign
Of other-worldly groping
After false hope and certainty.
You think you are practical, pragmatic, cool,
Scientific, true heir of Enlightenment, breathing
Only rational air.
But your modernity is old, foretold, foregone
In Aquinas and John Donne, Ibn Sina and Ibn
Rushd, al-Ghazzali and many more; your
Tolerance ends sharply at the blade of difference, a
Name for fear of all but conformity.
You think you think for your
Self but you have no
Idea where your ideas were made; your
Pragmatism a code (read Dante) for expedience,
Convenience, and absence of all value. You believe
Nothing, and your morals – if any – come
From the dark night from which you think you have
Emerged. The sun in whose dazzling you drown yourself
Is the bland light of indifference, of ignorance.
Your humanity, your science rest on
Blind, abstract, dog-eared
Devotion.
Garment
M.A.R. Habib
And You, it seems, are not there:
A paler objectivity beckons,
A colder glance, a more distant
Pattern;
A dream of provisionality, to
Lull the terror of the object.
Not the first frenzied rush
Into the world’s lap, the
Mistressing of otherness, the cold
Greek glare
Through fancy’s yielding columns.
Not the implemental urge
Desecrating thinghood,
Sacrificing the world’s inviolability
In fires lit against the sky:
Wonder damned by human need.
Not the indifference
Of the inward gaze, enduring
A subject’s paralysis, betraying
To the outermost realm
A foreign lamp, flickering
On a golden edge.
Not earth as arena
Of warring gods, stale
To depose another’s conquest,
Covetous of space and place, to
Still the world’s face.
Not heaven as reward, sublimation
Of losses craving redemption, greed
For height, baptised as
Abstinence: cold steel in the promising sun
Of a remote shrine.
An older harmony, fainter
Rhythm, seep
From the old, old womb:
Bold road, lined with crucifixions,
Tears of flame, infolding the last
Garment before God.
Forest
M.A.R. Habib
On this
Inward shrine, I shall build
My peace.
No outward realm can tempt
My longing.
Against the sky, my will is
Frozen, in purity of Night:
No shadow of shame can touch me,
No joy can disharmonise
My elements of prison
Forest of light,
Beneath your glinting willows
I have lain, blind
To the sky’s dazzling sermon;
At your edges I have heard
The crystal sea, whispering
Its remote call.
Mother
M.A.R. Habib
One day you will not be there, sitting
on your armchair, cutting coriander, as I sit
On the sofa with my laptop, typing
and not talking. One day I will need you
to forgive my silences and inattention,
To be there to make tea for, to massage your
Swollen leg, to run to pick up your phone.
I am sorry for all my absences, all the times
I should have been there, when you were
In pain, or returned from hospital, or needed
Groceries. Caught up in the cares of
World and career, e-mails and promotions and
Bank statements. Do not let your absence
Fall upon mine just yet: let me let you
See what you have been to me, what you are