by Shadab Zeest Hashmi Starry night, a large starry night with infinite trees, is the background of what seems to be an architectural form— a balcony, bridge, courtyard with pillars? In the foreground, a sphere with a curve draped over it like an arm. This drawing has the expansiveness that suggests eternity (or waiting for…

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi The fridge is between pesto and grasshopper green; the dining table is oval. A cubist picture hangs on the wall. It changes meaning, depending on the time of the day and the way I fall into its shapes and clever shades. The fish in the painting’s octagon looks like a remote…

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi There is nothing more exciting to me as a writer than catching a new place at daybreak— the moment that marks the beginning of a city's unique rhythms, when a traveler may somnambulate into its most secret, subtle self, its still-dreaming, unspoken quintessence. In this sliver between night and day, before…

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi A single feather, milky blue, just fallen on my threshold, is from a Turkestan hill dove flying south from China to Peshawar, I imagine, though it is more likely to have been shed by a buttonquail which is common in these parts. There is no house or door, only a threshold…

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi Photo by Ian Boyden When you listen as keenly for humanity’s pulse as Sam Hamill does, you “fall into the place where everything is music”— in Rumi’s words. This is the music where all cultures meet, where the spirit finds its truest articulation: a place impossible even to imagine in our…

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi You write of your country as if from a great distance. Distance is journey’s squinting twin; it courts vision. My country, you will understand, came from vision’s egg. It came from a dreamer of journeys—a poet who entertained nightly the spirits of distant poets: Plato, Ghazali, Rumi, Hafiz, Goethe— sojourners all.…

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi Jinn: a spirit capable of appearing in human and animal forms and influencing humankind for either good or evil. A startling laugh, low as if muffled by a dupatta, an old net dupatta I imagine, makes me turn but there is no one there. The walls are the color of vanilla…

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi Language on the tongue is need and desire and now, but more potently, it is the taste of ancestral memory: the truest flavor of our origins, almost indescribable and yet at the root of the desire for expression itself, like Michelangelo’s Adam reaching for God, permanently in pursuit of exactitude but…

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi It was in a small, black, hardbound volume of Iqbal’s Urdu verse, that I saw the name Goethe for the first time. Iqbal’s Baang e Dara had belonged to me since before I could read and it became an object of mystery, likely due to the manner in which it entered…

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi Exile is a state of mind and quite necessary in the kind of critical awareness, imaginative empathy and artistic autonomy that go into a work of excellence, a “global work.” Our lists of poets we consider as “world poets,” assuming that “world poet” is indeed a meaningful category, may vary dramatically…

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi Federico Garcia Lorca’s casidas are free adaptations of the Andalusi-Arabic qasidas, which he had read in Spanish. In Robert Bly’s English rendition of Lorca’s casidas, the flavor of the classical Arabic qasida form has been preserved to a considerable extent, even though it reaches us through various levels of distillation: first,…

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi Mughal miniature showing a poetry reading, c. 1640-50 The ghazal entered my consciousness first as music (on Radio Pakistan or my parents’ LPs), accessible only through melody, beat, rhyme, refrain; the poem’s literary heft, of course, utterly lost on me. The ghazal was really a visceral stimulus in my pre-language existence…

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi Peshawar Railway Station If there is a thought urgent enough to return to, it came on a train and was cut off at my station. All the rest is an obsessive plan to go back, find the nodes and connect them. In 1996 when I moved to San Diego with my…

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi The camera, on the roof of a teashop, was abandoned for two reasons: In the winter mist of a Persian garden, the camera had caught a green-cloaked figure. Then, at the moment a village lorry belched, tearing the song of a Snow Finch into confetti, there were five seconds of static…

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi Heat is eerie: lipsticks left unrefrigerated melt into deformity, ice cream liquefies and renders the scoop useless; fruit and flower stalls carry the smell of that peculiar cusp between ripe and rotten. Then rain comes, licking the sky green; the veil between the mysteries and the sun-weary, bleached and hardened world…

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi I felt in the pit of my stomach the proximity to my school as the car approached the Air Force base and the diminutive Air Force planes in (almost pretty) earth tones became visible on the runway through the large gates. The car would now turn into the school lane and…

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi Torkham, the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, felt like an utter release— as if we were random things, a fistful of summer insects set free in space. This, of course, was before the Soviet war. I was in elementary school. Dwarfed by the standoffish ice blue mountains on the road to…