“Before You Came” ~ Faiz Ahmed Faiz
My mother is lying in bed, tired. She says: I don’t think it is healthy to read Franz Kafka before you are trying to go to sleep with a heavy backpack of thoughts you have been carrying all day. I tell her I am not reading Kafka but critical essays on Kafka, it is not the same. It is worse, but I don’t tell her that.
Words and stories serve as crutches because our limbs are too weak to carry understanding by ourselves. Understanding is a blessed burden.
We are so vulnerable when we really do fall—be it literally, or for a city, or for a person.
I have not been able to, in Kafka’s words, “get the claws of Prague” out of my system.
We are returning to Prague tomorrow and then Sunday fly back to New York City. I am looking forward to it as if friends and family await me there when, as a matter of fact, it is a very reserved city and language is a huge barrier for communication and expression.
I hate cold weather. I don’t know what it is about cobble streets that makes me not feel cold. Perhaps the heat of hands that have placed stones that remain decades later? I don’t know but I can tolerate it.
Re-reading Kafka I recalled a poem by Faiz Ahmed Faiz. Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911-1984) was a renowned Pakistani poet, and one of the most famous poets of the Urdu language. He was an avowed Marxist. In 1962, he was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize by the Soviet Union. In the 1930s Faiz Ahmed Faiz married a British woman, Alys Faiz and they had two daughters.
I dedicate this poem to Prague and recollection of a longing I had forgotten about since…South Africa? Once the seeds of desire are planted they must bloom, into a weed or flower we know not, but bloom they must, lest they become part of an underground sea where no one goes deep sea diving.
A lof of Faiz‘s poems can be interpreted as love poems even when originally intended as political and social commentary on the age of imperialism on many levels.
This is one of my favorites.
“Before You Came”
Before you camethings were as they should be:
the sky was the dead-end of sight,
the road was just a road, wine merely wine. Now everything is like my heart,
a color at the edge of blood:
the grey of your absence, the color of poison, of thorns,
the gold when we meet, the season ablaze,
the yellow of autumn, the red of flowers, of flames,
the black when you cover the earth
with the coal of dead fires. And the sky, the road, the glass of wine?
the sky is a shirt wet with tears,
the road a vein about to break,
and the glass of wine a mirror in which
the sky, the road, the world keep changing. Don’t leave now that you’re here–
Stay. So the world may become like itself again:
so the sky may be the sky,
the road a road,
and the glass of wine not a mirror, just a glass of wine.
“a color at the edge of blood”, as when the sky is bluer than blue, a perspective to carry with me as the day begins, thank you.
beautiful words…brought tears…” Stay. So the world may become like itself again “