COVER STORY
By Sa’ad Nazeer
Nasir Kazmi, the poet of unvoiced feelings, of age-old delightful partings and fleeting forlorn meetings is, to me, a man for all seasons. He belongs among the greats who linger in the timeless corridors of poetic tradition, where spirits like Blake and Keats roam. That era of well-articulated emotions expressed not by direct speech, but distilled onto coffee-coloured parchments, flickers before my inward eye whenever I deliberately stumble upon Kazmi’s verse. He doesn’t merely write; he weaves. His poetry is a mural, etched across the mind, transporting the reader to an age when purity, of thought, of soul, was untouched by worldly clutter. It is raw and sacred, like an untouched pasture bathed in the morning hush.
Thousands of years of human history and reason, wave after wave of civilisations have come and gone, and yet some of us still yearn for the simplest of settings: bonfires under a sleepy moon, mountain hikes that lead nowhere in particular, riverside strolls, going through misty valleys lost in time, enjoying the hush of desolate forests, luxuriating on winter evenings with a lifetime friend having chai, walking in the rain like characters borrowed from a Kiarostami film.
His cinema never forces an emotion, it lets it breathe. Abbas Kiarostami doesn’t hand you meaning; he leaves it by the roadside like a forgotten clue, trusting the viewer to kneel and notice. His world is one of subtle absences and tender pauses, where dialogue is sparse, but silence resounds.
Much like Kazmi’s poetry, his films do not chase resolution: they create a space for quiet recognition. Even in an age where the clock’s heartbeat has grown terribly frantic, these scenes offer solace. They whisper to the primitive within us, reminding us that despite modernity’s heavy cloak, we remain wanderers at heart. That’s precisely why Kazmi’s words hit home - his verse invokes the primitive soul that was lost somewhere in the noise.
Kazmi’s diction is disarmingly simple, especially when placed beside his contemporaries. Yet within that simplicity lies profound depth. He masters the shorter behr - the metrical pattern in Urdu poetry - pouring weighty thoughts into light syllables with ease. One of his signatures is how he begins: nearly every poem opens with a familiar feeling, a known setting, a soft whisper of nostalgia. But as the verse unfolds, it draws the reader deeper and deeper, until suddenly, you are knee-deep in pathos, wondering how you got there.
He lent his voice to the ordinary soul, the one grappling with crossroads, bruised by time, and quietly rebuilding. And isn’t that, in essence, all of us at one point or another?
As Andrei Tarkovsky is to cinema, Kazmi is to verse. Tarkovsky, the cinematic poet, had an eye for the eternal in fleeting moments. “When I speak of poetry,” Tarkovsky once said, “I am not thinking of it as a genre. Poetry is an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality.” Like Tarkovsky’s long, meditative takes, Kazmi’s verse stretches time. His poetry invites you to experience the flicker of a candle, the hush between heartbeats. For both, time is not just a backdrop, it’s a character. In Kazmi’s world, even the indescribable is somehow spoken. He renders in verse what escapes language: the mellow ache of the soul, the quiet pulse of longing, the tender fractures of the psyche.
Tarkovsky never rushed a frame, and Kazmi never hurried a thought. In both, the silence speaks louder than sound. Tarkovsky built emotional bridges between past and present, not by explaining, but by allowing time to pass in its raw, unedited form. Kazmi does the same with his quiet verses that stretch across memory like bridges built from mist. His poetry, much like Tarkovsky’s imagery, makes the invisible visible. You don’t just read Kazmi, you feel the rustle of time moving against your skin. For both artists, time is sacred, and through their work, it becomes almost tangible - something you can hold, if only momentarily.
Why do we read poetry? Not for fun. Not merely for entertainment. We read poetry because it cracks open our hidden selves. It explores the fault lines within the psychological, the emotional and the spiritual. In verse, we trace the centuries-old struggles of humanity. It is an act of empathic excavation. After all, we are celestial beings marooned in flesh, and poetry offers us glimpses of what we once were and what we’ve become.
Kazmi’s poetry carries us away from the mundane to the margins, the boondocks of being, where the sun sets in crimson and the sky stares down like the stare of a lover. He leaves us there, alone with our nostalgia.
His verse is like a tender wind stirring the leaves, not to rattle, but to remind: someone, somewhere, once loved you, still might. Even if it lives only in the pastures of imagination, even if fleeting, it grants a reprieve.
When he writes of unrequited love, he captures the aching subtleties that others gloss over. Why don’t we feel the same butterflies again after a heartbreak?
“Naye kapde badal kar jaun kahan, aur baal banaun kis ke liye” (Where should I go dressed in new clothes, and for whom should I comb my hair?). How cruelly gentle is this lament, and how true. People fall in love again, but not in the same way.
“Woh shakhs to shehr hi chhorr gaya, main bahar jaun kis ke liye?” (That person has left the city altogether, so for whom should I step outside?). These lines open emotional Pandora’s boxes. Is suffering the hallmark of true love? Or are we marked more deeply by the things we yearn for but never attain?
Isn’t this textbook materialism? Or is it about the thirst for recognition? Recognition, perhaps, is our truest drug.
“Nasir kya kehta phirta hai, kuchh na suno to behtar hai” (What Nasir keeps saying, it’s better not to listen).
Kazmi’s poetry is like a Christopher Nolan film, layered, looping, elusive. You descend into it like a dream within a dream, and soon you lose track of the real. Much like Nolan’s cinematic architecture, Kazmi’s verses defy linearity. They spiral inward and outward simultaneously, creating emotional labyrinths where the reader wanders willingly. His imagery, deceptive in its simplicity, draws you in. Before you know it, you’re caught in a web of contradictions: presence and absence, love and renunciation, hope and disillusionment. I call this subtlety The Kazmi Effect.
Nolan bends time and narrative; Kazmi bends feeling and memory. Both create a limbo - one visual, the other emotional, where you don’t merely follow a story, you live within it. The deeper you go, the less sure you are of what you know. But that, perhaps, is the point: both artists remind us that clarity is overrated, and that truth often dwells in the shadows of ambiguity.
In one of his verses, someone stands alone after midnight: “Main hoon, raat ka ek bajja hai” (It is one o’clock at night, and here I am). He does nothing. He simply stands. Time does not pass here - it sinks, as it does in Tarkovsky’s cinema. With each line, Kazmi weaves an intricate web of emotions: loneliness tinged with citrus bitterness, existential drift, a theatre of the absurd stitched with insomnia and melancholy.
One of Kazmi’s recurring themes is the longing for the one whose silence hurts the most. There is desire, yes, but also disillusionment.
“Niyyat-e-shauq bhar na jaye kahin” (May the intention of longing never grow weary). We chase after hollow idols, and one day, abruptly, we stop. Epiphany arrives not with a bang but a whisper. This moment of surrender, of stepping back from obsession, is one of poetry’s most honest truths.
Kazmi writes about broken things, not the kind you fix, but those that remain cracked forever. People, too, he shows us, are often irreparable. The finality in some of his poems startles the reader, triggering questions of their worth and existence. Are we really indispensable or merely a cosmic footnote or is it an illusion of our narcissistic dark side? But just as despair creeps in, Kazmi’s tone shifts. He doesn’t abandon his reader. Like an elder guiding a lost child through a bustling bazaar, he takes your hand and leads you to someplace known - bittersweet, warm, and dimly lit with memory.
He is the master of emotional juxtaposition, merging the bitter with the sweet until even heartbreak has a pleasant aftertaste. He incorporates them so well that the bitter and the sweet start tasting the same if you are okay with bygones in the first place. If not, then alas, anxiety attacks! He gently prods old wounds, extracting beauty from pain. His reflections offer a melancholic awareness of one’s existence, a retro hue washed over our modern shadows. He reminds us: the same dreams that lift men to the heavens are the ones that dash them to pieces.
‘Pehli barish,’ one of Kazmi’s masterpieces, is a testament to his emotional and poetic prowess. He employs every symbol in the poetic lexicon - and invents a few of his own - yet never feels redundant. Kazmi doesn’t explain pain; he shows it. And in that showing, he wounds you softly. Whenever I recite his poetry, it feels like he’s giving voice to something long buried within me, an emotion I’ve felt but never named. He reminds me often of Mahmoud Darwish, especially in the way he plumbs the depths of the human heart.
Kazmi dives into the heart’s wilds and wanders its forgotten paths then returns with beauty cupped in his palms. It’s as if he sits beside you, places a gentle hand on your shoulder, and whispers: “I know. It’s a lot. You’ve carried baggage all your life. It’s okay to feel melancholic about your past choices. But don’t let that melancholy become your cage. You’re going to pull through. I promise.”
He holds his own among the titans of modern Urdu verse: Noon Meem Rashid, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Parveen Shakir, Ahmed Faraz, Akhtarul Iman, Ahmed Nadeem Qasmi, and others. Yet Kazmi will be remembered differently. He will endure not just through scholarly acclaim, but in the quiet moments of countless readers, whenever the heart remembers how it once broke softly.
For many youthful springs to come, he will remain the poet for all seasons.