Poetry by Muslims

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Web Links to Sites for Contemporary Muslim Poets

One of things you'll see here is that just because a poet is a Muslim, it does not mean his or her poetry is about "Islam." That is why I called this section, "Poetry by Muslims." Maybe that is the best part about all these poets, they are Muslim and they are concerned about all sorts of things, maybe not things you thought Muslims would be concerned about.

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Kyla Pasha

Her website contains selections from her poems and her blog.

  • Born
  • 1979, Islamabad, Pakistan
  • Educated
  • 2003 onwards, MIS Comparative Religion, University of Washington, Seattle
  • 2001, BA History & Creative Writing, Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio
  • 1997, A Levels, Froebels International School, Islamabad
  • Works
  • 2005, To Hold Up the Floor, 16/11, Chowk, Poem
  • 2005, Falling In, 21/8, Chowk, Poem
  • 2005, The Leaving Contract, Alhamra Literary Review, 1: Spring 2005, Story excerpt
  • 2004, History of the World, 14/8, Chowk, Poem
  • 2004, Guide, 7/7, Chowk, Poem
  • 2004, Ashura: Atonement, Mourning and Return, 2/3, Chowk, Essay
  • 2004, Yom Kippur 5764 and Flight, 21/2, Chowk, Poems
  • 2003, Dost, one-woman show, performed at numerous venues by Ponni Arasu of the Nigah Media Collective, Delhi.
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Agha Shahid Ali

Agha Shahid Ali was born on February 4, 1949 and passed away on December 8, 2001. He grew up in Kashmir, and was later educated at the University of Kashmir, Srinagar, and the University of Delhi. He earned a Ph.D. in English from Pennsylvania State University in 1984, and an M.F.A. from the University of Arizona in 1985. He authored several collections of poetry, including Rooms Are Never Finished (W.W. Norton & Co., 2001), The Country Without a Post Office (1997), The Beloved Witness: Selected Poems (1992), A Nostalgist's Map of America (1991), A Walk Through the Yellow Pages (1987), The Half-Inch Himalayas (1987), In Memory of Begum Akhtar and Other Poems (1979), and Bone Sculpture (1972). He was also the author of T. S. Eliot as Editor (1986), translator of The Rebel's Silhouette: Selected Poems by Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1992), and editor of Ravishing Disunities: Real Ghazals in English (2000)


Shahid received fellowships from The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Ingram-Merrill Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation and was awarded a Pushcart Prize. He held teaching positions at the University of Delhi, Penn State, SUNY Binghamton, Princeton University, Hamilton College, Baruch College, University of Utah, and Warren Wilson College.


Shahid's poetry is best described by an American contemporary - Shahid drew on the lyric poetry tradition of the ghazal while joining it with Western poetic influences, including the sounds and rhythms of the English language. His range of conventions, covering two very different poetic traditions, were truly multicultural - the result being English language ghazals in which the rich musical pattern, often lost in translation, stood fully revealed:


Where are you now? Who lies beneath your spell tonight
before you agonize him in farewell tonight?
I beg for haven: Prisons, let open your gates-
A refugee from Belief seeks a cell tonight.
("Ghazal", The Country without a post office, 1997)
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SNOWMEN

My ancestor, a man
of Himalayan snow,
came to Kashmir from Samarkand,
carrying a bag
of whale bones:
heirlooms from sea funerals.
His skeleton
carved from glaciers, his breath arctic,
he froze women in his embrace.
His wife thawed into stony water,
her old age a clear
evaporation.
This heirloom,
his skeleton under my skin, passed
from son to grandson,
generations of snowmen on my back.
They tap every year on my window,
their voices hushed to ice.
No, they won't let me out of winter,
and I've promised myself,
even if I'm the last snowman,
that I'll ride into spring
on their melting shoulders.
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STATIONERY

The moon did not become the sun.
It just fell on the desert
in great sheets, reams
of 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.
(from The Half-Inch Himalayas, 1987)


The previous two poems were reprinted from The Kashmiri Network

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Even the Rain

What will suffice for a true-love knot? Even the rain?
But he has bought grief's lottery, bought even the rain.
"our glosses / wanting in this world" "Can you remember?"
Anyone! "when we thought / the poets taught" even the rain?
After we died--That was it!--God left us in the dark.
And as we forgot the dark, we forgot even the rain.
Drought was over. Where was I? Drinks were on the house.
For mixers, my love, you'd poured--what?--even the rain.
Of this pear-shaped orange's perfumed twist, I will say:
Extract Vermouth from the bergamot, even the rain.
How did the Enemy love you--with earth? air? and fire?
He held just one thing back till he got even: the rain.
This is God's site for a new house of executions?
You swear by the Bible, Despot, even the rain?
After the bones--those flowers--this was found in the urn:
The lost river, ashes from the ghat, even the rain.
What was I to prophesy if not the end of the world?
A salt pillar for the lonely lot, even the rain.

.

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The Wolf's Postcript to 'Little Red Riding Hood'

First, grant me my sense of history:
I did it for posterity,
for kindergarten teachers
and a clear moral:
Little girls shouldn't wander off
in search of strange flowers,
and they mustn't speak to strangers.
And then grant me my generous sense of plot:
Couldn't I have gobbled her up
right there in the jungle?
Why did I ask her where her grandma lived?
As if I, a forest-dweller,
didn't know of the cottage
under the three oak trees
and the old woman lived there
all alone?
As if I couldn't have swallowed her years before?
And you may call me the Big Bad Wolf,
now my only reputation.
But I was no child-molester
though you'll agree she was pretty.
And the huntsman:
Was I sleeping while he snipped
my thick black fur
and filled me with garbage and stones?
I ran with that weight and fell down,
simply so children could laugh
at the noise of the stones
cutting through my belly,
at the garbage spilling out
with a perfect sense of timing,
just when the tale
should have come to an end.


(Professors note: I am presently in love with the above poet)

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