These are English translations of Urdu poems by Jaun Elia, who has been called the "poet of pain." Syed Sibt-e-Asghar Naqvi (1931-2002), more commonly known as Jaun Elia, was a Pakistani Urdu poet, philosopher, biographer, and scholar. A child prodigy, he began writing poetry at age eight but didn't published his first poetry collection, Shayad, until age sixty.

I am strange—so strange
that I self-destructed and don't regret it.
―Jaun Elia, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

The wound is deep—companions, friends—embrace me!

These are poems about coming together, or failing to come together due to misunderstandings, alienation, divisions, a loss of interest, or simply the passage of time affecting human relationships …

Come!
by Michael R. Burch

Will you come to visit my grave, I wonder,
in the season of lightning, the season of thunder,
when I have lain so long in the indifferent earth
that I have no girth?

When my womb has conformed to the chastity
your anemic Messiah envisioned for me,
will you be satisfied that my sex was thus rendered
unpalatable, disengendered?

for Beth

Have you tasted the bitterness of tears of despair?
Have you watched the sun sink through such pale, balmless air
that your soul sought its shell like a crab on a beach,
then scuttled inside to be safe, out of reach?

Might I lift you tonight from earth’s wreckage and damage
on these waves gently rising to pay the moon homage?
Or better, perhaps, let me say that I, too,
have dreamed of infinity . . . windswept and blue.