Saturday, November 27, 2004
HISTORY'S END ?
As I turn to the mirror of my heart,
Always then the last resort;
As I ask it in its agony,
'Mirror, mirror, of my heart;
How, indeed, has the year gone by?'
For the December of another year
Is finally, finally, all but here.
'Good master, then,' my heart weeps out loud,
'Remember not how, over your scribbling bowed,
Your piteous self in yesteryear,
Penned a poem in pain you scarce could bear.
For had it not been the 2003rd, the new year?'
So howbeit in 2004;
Did history take a new detour?
Alas, dear reader, if only you'd known,
That we, of the Muslims, have been thrown,
For better, or for worse, one year on,
Into an impasse of no return.
Alas, dear reader, as you read,
My lamentations, prayers and my dread;
All of a year as in 2003,
Now past the pages of history.
You'll know then that little has changed;
Has our history, indeed, come to its fag end?
Here then, that song of 2003;
So new, so fresh in its pain and its hope,
That how can we, with another such, ever cope :
'Twas a year ago, when I had laid my hopes anew,
For one was full of plans and dreams.
Ne'er minding the shame, the hurt, the trials of old;
And I was lookin' for the time ahead.
For, it was, they said the new year 2003.
But scarcely had the year begun,
When Islam was again declared as the enemy to be,
Not enough was the broken lives in Afghanistan,
Not enough the agony in Palestine!
For, it was, they said the New Year 2003...
Yes, O comrades, barely had the year been born,
Were there tremblings of a war to be.
And long before the rain of fire,
One's heart bled for Iraq in 2003.
For men of power more, but less of compassion,
Raved and ranted of threats and deals.
And Oh! How the Ummah throbbed, and thronged, in pain,
On the morn' of 2003.
Will this misery never end, Oh Lord;
Won't this pain ever subside, dear God?
But why this trial so eternal, so unending:
Is this, indeed, our fate to be?
Or is this Thy retribution for 2003?
But there arose a song within me;
Telling me of the Law Divine:
That the fate of a people, God changes not,
For 'twas the people who had to change it first,
Even in this year of 2003.
Oh! For the Chechen: incarnation of the spirit defiant!
Woe is the Russian Czar, who, to its pain, incompliant.
And Oh for the misery of Chechnya; of its children and women brave,
Who, with their lives, bought the sweetness of the grave!
Away from the pain, the suffering, Oh Lord;
Away from the tribulations in seeking after the world.
And away, away, Oh God,
From the horror that was 2003.
Was suicide then the only way,
For the Palestinian heroes of yesterday?
Suicide bombers they were to be called
Oh! for the agony and pain of it all!
For, it all happened in 2003.
And God did mention from of old,
That our prophets were, indeed, told;
That not by burning the books heavy,
Would knowledge be removed for eternity.
Nay! Not by knowledge, but by the knower;
Not by scholarship, but by the scholar;
Would the Lord, our God, take up learning from hereof.
As it did transpire in 2003.
For him who struggled, him who strove;
Him who, within the dungeons, bore
For years on end a lifetime's learning;
Him did God take away from this yearning!
Ah! Pity then the Bosnia which
Cries for the noble Izzetbegovich.
Yes, O my comrades! For he did die in the year 2003.
And how I remember, our friend Edward, the Christian.
Who for all his life was but a Palestinian.
A Gladiator in the battle with the Snake of Zion;
For till the end he never ceased being the Lion.
No matter what the Demon had to say,
Edward always had the last say!
For, he was, indeed, Edward Said;
And yes, he did pass away in 2003.
But the year hasn't passed, not yet;
And I hear a rumbling still.
My heart skips a beat that it doesn't get;
For, the earth has shaken in Iran
Oh my Lord! But where's the villain;
Who's the villain for all this misery?
And hear the women, how they cry!
Oh, if only it would pass away: this 2003.
But where is the hope,
Where is the way?
How can we, with these disasters, cope?
Ah! Listen to the Messenger, what does he say?
'Strange is the believer in his way:'
For let Evil visit him or let it be Good,
Patience and Resilience are his Food.
For, in Evil, thus, is also his making,
And in Good he makes in gratitude, the partaking.
Same is it for 2003 as it is for Eternity.
So did I write of 2003;
How then of 2004 and its misery?
Is it the same, this suffering, this pain?
Has it not all come over us yet again?
Did not the men of evil from power to power return?
Did not our scholars die out by their turn?
Have not the tears fallen off Palestine?
Over the martyr; the murder of Ahmed Yassin?
As it happened in 2004,
As always it was in the days of yore.
Tightened its coil, has the snake of Zion
In the departure of that 'last' bastion?
Farewell, then, O Abu Ammar,
Leaving us the legacy of an unfinished war.
And all of it before the end of 2004.
In Iraq still rages the tempest of faith,
Unperturbed by the martyrs' pile of wreath upon wreath.
Nay, rejoicing even, is the Resistance, at the sight of that pile,
For with one of the Two Victories it will soon have to reconcile
Cry then, O Fallujah, that 'One is, indeed, mine!'
Cry then, O Fallujah, 'the Demon's power we shall, thus, undermine.'
Weep not, O watcher, for the laying waste of Fallujah,
For has it not been decreed by our Lord, Almighty Allah,
That He has, indeed, extracted from us a price,
In return for His everlasting Paradise.
Has He not asked: 'What thinketh ye, ye hapless men,
That Paradise would soon become your possession,
As soon as ye say, 'We believe'?
Without ever wanting, your earnings, to leave;
Without yet a suffering, a trial, by its touch,
Not having scorched you, and asked of you much;
As it did happen from of old
To many a people of similar human mould!'
Patience and Resilience, then, my comrades,
Must still be our weapons as we scale the Demon's barricades.
With the armour of our knowledge that the prayer of the oppressed
Will never, not for a minute, be for an answer be ever suppressed.
For as the Demon plots at the dusk of 2004,
His Maker, the Plotter Supreme, encompasses his plots in full, as before
Even as early as the Dawn of his own creation
How then stands the plan of the Demon before that Revelation,
But as stands the solitary drop in the vast Ocean!
And how much even less,
For the Demon, the thought, to caress!
Wake, then, O descendents of Adam,
From the slumber that has been your wont.
Rise, then O heirs of Adam, from the silence of the lambs.
And let the Demon know that, for once, he, his bidding do, he certainly can't.
No, not in this dusk of 2004, nor in the dawn of 2005,
Nor until the Last Day and not while there is even one of you alive.
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