❝Do not ask of me, my love, that love I once had, I thought life glowed bright as long as you were near. With your grief, why does the world's sorrow matter, Your face is what keeps the spring of this world here.❞
Faiz Ahmed Faiz was a Pakistani poet and one of the most celebrated poets of the Urdu language. A leading member of the Progressive Writers' Movement, he blended romantic poetry with political activism. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature and received the Lenin Peace Prize.
Nazm is a Hindi-Urdu poetic form that tells a single, continuous story or idea from start to finish — unlike the ghazal's independent couplets. Drawing on Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Allama Iqbal, Gulzar, and Sahir Ludhianvi, this collection rewards a slower, more attentive read.
❝My longing rises to my lips as a prayer, O God, may my life be like a candle's flame, may the world's darkness be dispelled by my breath, may my glow bring light to every place.❞
❝Better than the whole world is our Hindustan, we are its nightingales, this is our garden, if we are in foreign lands, our heart stays in the homeland, know us to be there too, wherever our heart is.❞
❝We shall see, certainly we too shall see, that promised day, which is written on eternity's tablet, when these towering mountains of tyranny and cruelty will blow away like tufts of cotton.❞
❝From the grapes of tender feelings I have brought today this wine, beloved, with my own hands I shall pour you the cup today, let me first offer it to you, then the world shall receive its blessing, before all others, my tavern of wine welcomes you first.❞
❝This leprous daybreak, this dawn mauled by night, this is not that dawn for which we had waited, this is not that dawn with the longing for which, friends had set out, believing we'd find it somewhere.❞
❝Beyond the stars there are yet more worlds, there are yet more trials of love to face, these skies are not empty of life, here there are hundreds more caravans still to come.❞
❝Some of my belongings still lie with you, some rain-soaked days of the monsoon are kept there, and a night wrapped inside one of my letters lies there too, extinguish that night, return to me my things.❞
❝Sometimes a thought crosses my mind, that had my life passed in the soft shade of your tresses, it might have flourished, might have bloomed green, rather than this darkness that is my life's destiny.❞