“No, I wasn’t meant to love and be loved”
No, I wasn’t meant to love and
be loved.
If I’d lived longer, I would
have waited longer.
Knowing you are faithless
keeps me alive and hungry.
Knowing you faithful would
kill me with joy.
Delicate are you, and your
vows are delicate, too,
so easily do they
break.
You are a laconic marksman.
You leave me
not dead but perpetually
dying.
I want my friends to heal me,
succor me.
Instead, I get
analysis.
Conflagrations that would make
stones drip blood
are campfires compared to my
anguish.
Two-headed, inescapable
anguish!—
Love’s anguish or the anguish
of time.
Another dark, severing,
incommunicable night.
Death would be fine, if I only
died once.
I would have liked a solitary
death,
not this lavish funeral, this
grave anyone can visit.
You are mystical, Ghalib, and,
also, you speak beautifully.
Are you a saint, or just drunk
as usual?
Source: Poetry (April 2009).
This poem speaks to me on a couple different levels. I love the authors progression in
introducing the relationship. It feels like such a real reflection. In the beginning there is bitterness in the tone when the author says,"No, I wasn’t meant to love and be loved./ If I’d lived longer, I would have waited longer." A lamentation of their state of being perpetually waiting on someone who would never be theirs. Moving on the author spends three stanzas describing the degree of anguish this makes them feel. Then the subject turns to the narrators friends for the next two standaz describing the separation the narrator felt even from friends because of the relationship. It describes how they offered no comfort but rather criticizm using exquisite imagery to express the degree of harm their treatment made the narrator feel, for example: "Conflagrations that would make stones drip blood/ are campfires compared to my anguish." The narrator descibes how this feeling carries on over a period of time. The end though, is what grounds poem in reality,the part i connected with most, "You are mystical, Ghalib, and, also, you speak beautifully./ Are you a saint, or just drunk as usual?" This poem is about those silver tounged devils who may be genuine when they're sober but when they're drunk, they do what they have to to get what they want.
This poem speaks to me on a couple different levels. I love the authors progression in
introducing the relationship. It feels like such a real reflection. In the beginning there is bitterness in the tone when the author says,"No, I wasn’t meant to love and be loved./ If I’d lived longer, I would have waited longer." A lamentation of their state of being perpetually waiting on someone who would never be theirs. Moving on the author spends three stanzas describing the degree of anguish this makes them feel. Then the subject turns to the narrators friends for the next two standaz describing the separation the narrator felt even from friends because of the relationship. It describes how they offered no comfort but rather criticizm using exquisite imagery to express the degree of harm their treatment made the narrator feel, for example: "Conflagrations that would make stones drip blood/ are campfires compared to my anguish." The narrator descibes how this feeling carries on over a period of time. The end though, is what grounds poem in reality,the part i connected with most, "You are mystical, Ghalib, and, also, you speak beautifully./ Are you a saint, or just drunk as usual?" This poem is about those silver tounged devils who may be genuine when they're sober but when they're drunk, they do what they have to to get what they want.
No comments:
Post a Comment