This short short story by A R Daad has been translated from Balochi by Mahnoor Mustafa. Behind the door, on the wall, an old man had written the year and month of his arrival. “I am the youngest son of Salar. The day I came here, except woods and bushes, I could not find ...
This is the English translation of Gul Khan Naseer’s Balochi poem ‘Ya Khuda Wanda’. ‘O’ Gracious God bestow the Baloch nation with people who are: Sagacious, valiant, magnanimous, compassionate and courageous too Their prudence and sagaciousness be more glorious than the brightest morns Their evergreen wisdom be resplendently dazzling in magnificence and majesty Their ...
I always believed I’ll meet you some day Like old friends Or former lovers Bumping into one another In strange countries At ordinary cafes Where you were not supposed to go Where you were not supposed to be But somehow, someway Our paths cross And we meet for no apparent reason Some call it ...
I am the wailing wall In my cracks and clefts Lay the sorrows of ages In my stones Lives man and his loneliness I am the wailing wall Come to me Sit down and empty yourself I am a sponge In me I behold the flood Of human miseries I have seen man In his ...
All places holy Remind me How lonely I am How lonely I’ve been All these years, For millenniums. Out of me, Grew temples and tombs, The weeds of my soul. Now taller than me, Blocking the sun. My existence is a pilgrimage, From nowhere to nowhere. * Lahoot La’makaan is a holy shrine in ...
Stay put Time Thee move too much! Sometimes I wonder what is time made of When I was a child everyone said time never waits I always wondered why won’t it wait When I grew more Time kept ageing But never grew old I have never met Time But all this time, I’ve had a ...
The day we left We left a full moon behind On a pitch-black sky Highlighting the farthest stars and the whole Milky Way and beyond Sprinkled over the wildness of darkness like snow The day we left We left few more things behind The remains of an old fort Been there since the beginning ...
When the king is dead When the fire is lit When the skies are bloodshot red The clown will dance A dance of the dead Sowing seeds with as many hands Seeds from which only tomb stones grow The clown will dance Till the skies are covered in dark robes from end to end ...
Fazal Baloch has translated Taj Baloch’s poem from Balochi. The moonlight Adorned herself and kept singing till dawn But you didn’t come The desperate moonlight Buried all memories, hues and shades, and smiles In the bosom of the earth in a vast plain Every thorn of sun-shade shrubs Bit by bit crammed all the ...
Death is no longer a horror Life is Life which is dragged around the streets of Aleppo Eyes wide open Half dead, half alive Half awake, half asleep In times when hate is the only desire inhabiting hearts Men find themselves incapable of believing what fellow men are capable of doing In the streets ...
Akram Dashti
Sajid Hussain
Abdullah Abbas