Dil ki Hariali - Reflections on the Greening of the Heart

selected poems of jhaffur khan azad darakth

extraordinarily, now more living life.

! its time for springing

renewing from our roots,

tapping in to surging sap

throwing down with glucose surge,

stretching out  the clouds aloud

feeling in the fleshing leaves

singing out the sacreds sound

hearing death unleashing  breath,

trembling real  volcanic rage

igniting to the sun-baked heart 

dancing with day-bright kids

gobbling on the growing vine

slurpping saturating stuff

extraordinarily, now more living life.

            March, 2002 - jhaffur khan azad darakth

Slicing Orion

Too long since I

have contemplated

Sky.

Just Sky

with a view

to transpose it.

Too long since I

translated the texture

of dried leaves falling

on the face,

feeling the crackling cells

and freeing their sound.

Too long since I

Have crafted words

to slice Orion’s belt

and wintered the black mass

of time’s cold-boned energy.

Too long since I

Have seen the bark

And scarred the rights

Of buds that waited,

And starred about, 

with blown-gold embers,

the old hearth - heart

Too long too

since the throw-rug snow

quilted eyes with a view

to lick the powdered liquid

plastered thick and crusty

and reveal, revive, renew

the painted inner suit of life.

jhaffur khan azad darakth 4-19-01

The graffiti of the hoodlum species

The graffiti of the hoodlum species

Scrawls landscape-wide across the earth.

Ripping off once flowing geographic robes

With the geometry  of ordering abuse.

This patterned excrescence -

The fecal legacy of  planetary worms.

An endless patchwork graphing pad

of fields repetitively square

Of pastures parrelelogrammed

Beside the rectangulating  paddocks

Lie orderly, a falsely luring quilt

Covering wild outcrops, replacing copses

Ironing out the crenellated hillocks

Breaking up the undulating flow

of forest, steam and crow..

Irrigated circles stamped down

Like small pox vaccinations

Pock the weathered desert’s skin.

Roadlines strung like beetle trails

Without the artistry of happenstance,

Criss-cross in checkerboard,

Reducing turns to right and left.

Measured  forty acre increments

Rule out the once-wild grasslands’

Undivided entanglements of grain.

Oval stadia and air-strip triangles

Re-arrange the random dirt

While binary coded power lines

Connect with dotted poles,

And contoured strips devise

Pretentious parabola across

A runneling slope of hill.

And scattered here and there

Like neural spiders trembling

On their highway webs

The macro city-chips revise

This conscious circuitry of lines

And send out minions on munching machines

To carve some more remote redoubts

To pattern the forfeit universe

With the physical structure

Of our conquering hives.

Like the letter the Indian elder gave

To the NASAmen off to the moon

“be careful up there,

they are coming to take your land.”

Jhaffur khan azad darakth, jahaz vich, October 20,2000

Baazwan

Jisthara gulabon ka shaan

Kaabi khwabon se hattha nahin,

Ussthara mere yaadon ka jaan

Ab Baazon ke Raja se bartha rahi

Jab se mere manzil ke khirkian ne

Parindon ke sultan ki akhri sans li

Tab se mere badan ke nalion me

Asmaan ke hava ki josh a baithi. 

He jhaffur baandh pagri, achkan lagaley

Amiiron ke kaleen se uthadey wazwan

Aur garibon ka hissa garib ko dilaley

Aur khudrat ki halaath bachaley eh Bazwan!

Jhaffur khan Baazwan,  2-3-08

As it happens

Feeling unaccountably cheerful

this Septembering morning 

perhaps it’s the jazz streaming

through my squeakers,

perhaps that majestic healing sun

that stopped me in my tracks

at Avenue two with arms outspread

and exhaled directly upon my body,

an intimate royal moment

of obliteration and blinding light,

an acceptance of

the legitimacy of

joy

in real sudden living

as it happens. 

Jhaffur khan azad darakth – Septembered, 2003