Long Sagas Poems

Look up in the sky ! It’s a bird ! It’s a plane.
It’s Superman !
More powerful than a locomotive, faster than a speeding bullet, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. This fearless...

Read More

The word Wyrd is Old English and means 'destiny'. From the same root comes Urd, one of the Norns, and the Germanic words Werth, Warth, and Wurth, which mean 'become'. The root word means 'to...

Read More

Last Night 
by Faiz Ahmed Faiz
translation by Michael R. Burch

Last night, your memory stole into my heart
as spring sweeps uninvited through barren gardens
as morning breezes revive dormant deserts
as a patient suddenly feels better for no...

Read More

That soft-spoken Sovereign commands a big stick, 
runs the world into ruins, once our bailiwick.
If asked why, He grins grimly, pale lips slightly pursed:
"Vindication? Straightforward: It's Me and Me First" 

(To mesmerise people He needed...

Read More

“blessings from above
transformed lust to love
delusion to illumination
earth-heaven bilocation” - Unseeking Seeker   

When rays of saffron atonement  
streak through the indigo skies,  
a glitter of dawn begins  
to break over...

Read More

"Timeless trust,
   trapped in Selene's pendant,
                   pulsates purity and faith 
    ...

Read More

Listen to the shifting winds 
carrying musical meteors,
there soars floating
letters between 
lyrical lines,
emanating runes
that reflect 
revolving rhymes
of faith within
and beyond.
For we are more than
just spectators or actors, 
in this theatrical life,
we are the assigned 
maestros...

Read More

I'm torn in poetry ~ 
like a fractured syllable 
scattered across 
altars of glistening gold, 
mirroring the maskless faces 
of those, who once 
sold their sanctity for sins. 
Perhaps, there's a
cursed moonlight, 
to which I'll...

Read More

" Perhaps, life is just a disaster
wrapped in fairy-glow fragments ~
shimmering with stars of death... "

O' beloved moment of time,
take me where I belong,
in the henna haze of scentless leaves
draped in doves of lotus,
I'll whimsically...

Read More

"Paying homage to ancestral kyanites, 
      which once vibrated with indigo streams
  in sparks of salient storms ~
   I soar across melancholic mangroves, 
   ...

Read More

Once upon a silent summer eve, 
as fine vermilion lines, 
between bleeding moonlight, 
swiftly sailed across
  my darkness and I, 
sakura springs sang 
 dulcet melodies of 
  a deathless devotion, 
incised within...

Read More

City Police

There are countless episodes and sagas of the city police, the men in blue...
In their sacred duty to serve and to protect, they are  life heroes come true...

Everyday, at times and places undesigned,...

Read More

"Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it."~ Rumi

Dear Diary,

I’m a hopeless romantic, 
a sentimental sonnet
  scribbled...

Read More

Impeachment is neither a peach, a pullover nor is it a purple plum. And a sanctimonious swan is neither a swamp spinning yarn nor a spotty sporty spade. Ok then. Paste and post but not...

Read More

I was cursed with ink 
intoxicating blank canvases 
with toxic scribbles,
releasing twisted tales 
of suppressed troubles.
I was a forsaken  ebony rose 
in satan's grasp,
kneeling on ungodly needs
in a gothic fortress 
of woeful odes,
surrounded by...

Read More

 Listen to the 
ticking hands of twilight,
close your eyes,
while I take your thoughts
   to an ivory reverie of 
flickering fantasies… 
there I’m cruising 
above an 
 island of mystery
in a flying 
...

Read More

I gaze beyond 
the silver winged 
     heart of 
twinkling twilight,
lost within metaphors 
    in warm cashmere
    bows of midnight. 
Whilst lava lamps
  ...

Read More

In my blooming brokenness,
        I seek for a 
    clue of something meaningful,
but what if nothing    of velvety value
   ...

Read More

Madness exuded like the 
war cries of epic battles
and sagas' past,
the myth of man and 
the passionate woman.
As the eruption
began to procure its
preparations, Prince Alarumdives,
a moment with the King,
solace, questioning divinity.
"My father, what troubles 
plague...

Read More

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
I think I made you up inside my head.
-Sylvia Plath

I see no reason to rhyme, 
but an aching...

Read More

Why An Imam with a mobile 
is the last thing you will want  
For today, 
Has many reasons, 
many more to come in days to come! 

As your palm is already junk  
in...

Read More

 her untamable sakura spirit
glows like sweet scents
of petrichor peace,
perfumed in jasmine water,
whilst there’s no path
to golden rays of sunlight,
she shines for the elite vines
trailing through silver 
    gates of heaven.

and when...

Read More

I warned you about Mother telling her stories.
I warned you,
but you wouldn’t listen.

I warned you about the magic
of golem and djinn,
about lilac walks 
and mysterious circuses.
Stranded mice,
abandoned mice,
runaway mice,
unexceptional princesses,
all fodder for the worst sort...

Read More

Translations of Urdu couplets and poems by Momin Khan Momin

Perhaps
by Momin Khan Momin
loose translation by Michael R. Burch
 
The cohesiveness between us, you may remember, or perhaps not.
Our solemn oaths of faithfulness, you may remember,...

Read More

An elderly black man with a head of grey hair,
Loyal to the farmland he worked but did not own,
In a time when law and justice’s scales were not fair,
Had been that way long before he...

Read More