After Parveen Shakir.
This scenic evening of ours
Mingled with the perfume
Of your garment
With the burgeoning of my vision
Will last some mere moments
Just now
A star will unwind itself upon the horizon
Just then
Its winking will beckon to your heart
A memory
A tale of separation
Something not done
An unfulfilled dream
Something not said
To someone!
We should have met
In an age of gracefulness
In another heaven
In a different country!
Parveen Shakir was a noted Urdu writer who, at the age of 24, received the Pride of Performance (Tamġa-ē Ḥusn-e Kārkardagī), one of the highest awards conferred by the government of Pakistan in recognition of distinguished work in literature, art, sports, medicine, and science, upon the publication of her first volume of poetry, "Khushbu"(Fragrance)in 1976. The couplet "He is fragrance, he will scatter in the air / the trouble lies with the flower - where shall the flower go?" is typical: "fragrance" is a metaphor for an unfaithful lover, "air" for the secret loves, and "flower" to the person cheated on. She began writing, both in Urdu and English, at an early age, initially under the pen name "Beena" (which perhaps referred to the Bengali pronunciation of "veena," a plucked stringed instrument, or perhaps to the pre-Islamic form of marriage in which the wife owned a tent of her own, within which she retained complete independence from her husband.) She wrote free verse and traditional, but in both forms departed from conservative Urdu tradition. She was one of the first female poets to use the word "larki" (girl) in her work (Urdu poetry typically uses masculine syntax to refer to a lover), and she often used the first-person, feminine pronoun, rarely used even by female poets before her. Her works often referred to popular culture and mixed Urdu and English words and phrases, though both practices were considered inappropriate. In 1994, on her way to work as second secretary in the Federal Bureau of Revenue in Islamabad, she died when her car collided with a bus. The road on which the accident took place was subsequently named in her honor.
ReplyDelete