I Love You
Even a person born blind has never seen himself!
Yet when someone tells him,
move away, concrete may fall on your head.
He steps aside because he clings to life.
He cannot deny that he loves life.
And I love you more than life itself.
If I cannot even see you, by what courage could I say
that I do not love you?
The Servant
God out of love, gave us rules,
so that we do not become disobedient.
He gave us so much mercy and guidance in the Qur’an that,
even if all the waters of the sea were turned to ink, its description would not end.
And I too love you,
yet with just a few small rules I become poisonous.
God keeps us under so many commands because He loves us,
and He has placed a portion of that love within my heart as well.
So I keep this watchfulness, carrying the fear of losing you.
Yet because your heart is a servant to an unseen force called the age,
even true love feels like bondage to you.
Sense of Delay
Knowing life is uncertain, people still decorate their world.
With the uncertainty of whether I would have you or not, I too built dreams,
I loved you.
When death takes away the one who built a world,
and when a third party takes away love, why then does it feel
that everything built all this time was in vain?
Why does this sense not come
before death, or before love?
A Life of Mistakes
Nicotine to forget affection,
abnormal sleeping pills to forget sorrow.
To escape mistakes, at the very door of mistakes.
Alas, an entire life of mistakes!
Passing only through mistake after mistake.
Glass Shattered into a Hundred Pieces
A father in play, tosses the child resting in his lap upward.
The child trusts that below are the father’s hands.
You too had told me,
“I love you, you are mine.
If you love me too, become glass for me.”
Trusting you, I became glass.
Then I saw you throwing me upward.
Like the child, I too trusted your hands.
But astonishing me, you did not stop me from falling.
Loving you, trusting you, I shattered into a hundred pieces.
Enemies in the Guise of Friends
You are not friends, yet you perform as friends.
O enemies hidden in the guise of my friends,
I fear you more than my open enemies.
The aim of your arrows is far more precise.
Your blows do not strike only my body,
they cripple my soul as well.
Love Lost in the Dark
You are a vehicle rushing fiercely through the dense winter fog.
I stand alone, waiting you will come.
You will take me with you as your companion.
Yet piercing through the fog, you passed straight on.
The fog was so dense that I could not catch you,
I did not even have the strength to see you.
Successful at Forgetting
Turn the pages of some old calendar.
If you still do not find it, perhaps it has been erased by friction.
Then go and look once more on the epitaph.
If there too you cannot find the date,
when we last met!
Then think, today my death is successful.
And you too have successfully managed to forget me.
Alternative
One who goes far away once, even if he returns,
never truly returns in full.
Even then, he remains only as an alternative.
Where he had gone was not better than you,
perhaps that is why he came back.
At day’s end, he stays confined in your home.
When he finds an even better alternative, he will leave again.
Devotion to the Strong
With a heart soft as wax I have seen,
people melt it in the heat of neglect.
I have also bound my heart in stone,
and people beg even for a little companionship.
Then I learned to understand people find pleasure in striking softness.
And when they strike the strong and feel pain,
they return again to the strong, seeking care.