Love, a little church that standing all alone,

waits with open doors,

but nobody goes there to pray,

the prayers will go unsaid, now, where to go?

which way? love, be my beacon,

teach me to look at an empty sky without fear.

There is a land by faith I’ve seen

Where skies no clouded regions know;

Where they know not the sorrows of time

and no shadows fall to blight the view

That land no want has ever known,

Nor pain nor sickness nor distress;

there, Death, the last enemy, is slain;

There those who meet shall part no more,

And those long parted meet again.

There’s a land far away..

Beyond these wild winds and gloomy skies,

Beyond Death’s cloudy portal,

There is a land where beauty never dies

And love becomes immortal;

These are modern English translations of Urdu poems by Mirza Ghalib. 

Near Sainthood
by Mirza Ghalib
translation by Kanu V. Prajapati and Michael R. Burch

On the subject of mystic philosophy, Ghalib,
your words might have struck us as deeply profound ...
Hell, we might have pronounced you a saint,
if only we hadn't found
you drunk
as a skunk!

***

Ghazal
by Mirza Ghalib
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Not the blossomings of song nor the adornments of music:
I am the voice of my own heart breaking.

i’m looking for the face i had before the world was made
I was the primordial flaring forth, the gravitational waves,
the whirling galaxies, and the exploding supernovas that would become stars and planets.
I was the steaming planet Earth, the bacteria awash in the sea, and the early eukaryotes and multicellular animals.
I exploded in the Cambrian explosion, stumbled onto land, walked with dinosaurs,
saw trees and flowers appear, walked upright in Africa, and walked on the moon.
I felt the embrace of gravity. I was one with all that had been and all that was to be.

Snowflakes fall on the ground like
Wisdom that needs to be spread.
The fatter ones are the harshest ones,
And those are the ones that need to be said.
The tiniest flakes are the one-liners,
The bits of truths we learn every day
That sprinkle knowledge in my hair.
People avoid harsh truths,
But sometimes the truth is dressed as
A winter wonderland,
And sometimes that makes it
Easier to swallow.
I welcome snow on cold mornings.
It makes coming to life a lot simpler

Snowflakes fall on the ground like
Wisdom that needs to be spread.
The fatter ones are the harshest ones,
And those are the ones that need to be said.
The tiniest flakes are the one-liners,
The bits of truths we learn every day
That sprinkle knowledge in my hair.
People avoid harsh truths,
But sometimes the truth is dressed as
A winter wonderland,
And sometimes that makes it
Easier to swallow.
I welcome snow on cold mornings.
It makes coming to life a lot simpler