POEMS FOREVER
By Faiz Ahmed Faiz
Today, again, the mind searches for a word:
A word
Imbibed with wine or filled with venom,
Replete with love, or fraught with dread.
A word of affection:
Like a joyful glance –
One which carries the caress of soft, warm lips.
Brilliant – like a surge of the molten gold.
The very spring of excitement in the lovers’ embrace.
A word of aversion:
Like a wrathful sword –
One which forever devastates the oppressors’ strongholds.
Dark – like the night in a haunted graveyard.
The very utterance of it should burn my lips black.
(Translated by Sain Sucha)
By Shumaila Javed
In the room full of dark
Me with my scars
The pain that sometime kills me
And sometime I find ecstasy
Me with my loneliness
Lead to the land
Where the chirping birds
The calming sea
The soft breeze
That touches my soul and
Takes all my scars away
The thundering clouds
That showers the rain
And wash all the pain
I forget my reality
And dancing like insane
Makes me happy in my wonderland
By Hijab-un-Nisa Niaz
Just like chameleons, people change
The extent of their hypocrisy has a wide range
They want freedom of everything
Be it choice, speech, religion, opinion or anything
But, they are lying about it
To us and everyone else and we are totally buying it
Look around you, guys
See for yourself that there is no choice
We accept the ones who have no beliefs
But loathe the ones who have a single belief
We believe in not judging a book by its cover
But believe every single line of a newspaper cover
We believe in being open to opinions
But fire up at once if they differ from ours
We are against oppression
But oppress others to give up what they believe in without a valid reason
Forcing people to show skin
And change what they believe in
Is hypocrisy and contradiction at its peak
And just shows that the concept of freedom is one-sided and weak
Live and let live, you are liberal, aren’t you?
You know the answer and I think I know it, too.
Compiled by SK