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1 " Waiting for the Revolution can be as agonizing and intoxicating as waiting for one’s lover. "
― Agha Shahid Ali
2 " I flipped through their visions,left my number in their sleep.But no one called back.I called all night,called for years,called till their lids began to ring,ten, twenty, two hundred times,and then they went blind on my dreams.Now their eyes don't open.No one picks up the phone. "
― Agha Shahid Ali , The Veiled Suite: The Collected Poems
3 " Stationary"The moon did not become the sun.It just fell on the desertin great sheets, reamsof silver handmade by you.The night is your cottage industry now,the day is your brisk emporium.The world is full of paper.Write to me. "
4 " Then why let anything remainwhen whatever we lovedturned instantly to stone? "
― Agha Shahid Ali , A Nostalgist's Map of America: Poems
5 " There again is memory at my doorstep --jasmine crushed underdeparting feet.The moon extinguishes its silver painon the window. "
6 " In the heart's wild space lies the space of wilderness.What won't one lose, what home one won't give forever! "
― Agha Shahid Ali , Call Me Ishmael Tonight: A Book of Ghazals
7 " The moon touched my shoulderand I longed for a vanished love "
8 " He’s freed some fire from ice in pity for Heaven.He’s left open—for God—the doors of Hell tonight. "
9 " The man who buries his house in the sand and digs it up again, each evening, learns to put it together quickly and just as quickly to take it apart. My parents sleep like children in the dark. I am too far to hear them breathe "
10 " Srinagar hunches like a wild cat: lonely sentries, wretched in bunkers at the city’s bridges, far from their homes in the plains, licensed to kill . . . while the Jhelum flows under them, sometimes with a dismembered body. On Zero Bridge the jeeps rush by. The candles go out as travelers, unable to light up the velvet Void.What is the blesséd word? Mandelstam gives no clue. One day the Kashmiris will pronounce that word truly for the first time. "
― Agha Shahid Ali , The Country Without a Post Office
11 " Someone speak to the God.Someone turn the moon.My country is in Muhurram.And I have to call it an Eid. "
12 " Everyone carries his address in pocket so that atleast his body will reach home. "
13 " The country of the blind has ordered mirrorsIts one-eyed king's vision is now prime for time "
14 " Are you carrying anything that could be dangerous for the other passengers? O just my heart! "
15 " My memory is again in the way of your history "
16 " Karbala was chosen for Kashmir's seasons mixed into the graveyard's cold beds of roses we are such pilgrims. "
17 " We mourn the martyrs of Karbalaour skins torn with chains. "
18 " From windows we heargrieving mothers and snow begins to fall on us, like ashBlack on edges of flames,it cannot extinguish the neighborhoods,the homes set ablaze by midnight soldiers "
19 " All nightI keep the heart shutI am waiting for a greater madnessTo declare myself "
20 " I heard the incessant dissolving of silkI felt my heart growing so old in real time "
