Tuesday Poem

Dawn

It was not the beginning
Nor the end
Taking this for that
We stumbled
And lost our way

Less free now
to go to our temples
Doors battered, broken, boarded
We stumbled
And lost our way

Regroup
Retreat
Advance anew

There is a dawn
Not this dawn
Nor that dawn
But a dawn

We’ll know
When the light falls
On all of us
All of us
ALL of us.
____________
subh-e aazaadii. Translations in Baran Farooqi, Khalid Hasan,
Shiv Kumar, Victor Kierman.

by Anjum Altaf
from More Transgressions,
Poems inspired by Faiz Ahmed Faiz
LG Publishers Distributors, Delhi, 2021