In your absence… I have not taught… my tears to flow… In your absence
This my grievance… flow endless tears… For endless years.. this my grievance
Whilst I shed tears in Samarra… My tears remember Karbala
* * *
O’ who’s tale holds in its hand my own essence
I am Mehdi and I stand in a land distant
I bury my father and with him my patience
Askeri and in his grave my soul and guidance
Yet I remember when you, Sajjad’s hands buried
Your remains in his arms O’ beloved he carried
I cry blood but in his arms his own father bleeds
And his cries his own beloved does not see nor heed
* * *
Each cry of grief from us, a crime these tyrants deem
Yet in my eyes I see my women cry and scream
With my father’s death, went with him their souls it seems
And they don’t dream unless of Askeri they dream
Yet in my eyes I see all your women in chains
As they are struck and forced to walk on burning plains
And with each strike your daughters cry ‘help us Hussain!’
On the dust unburied whilst screamed out is your name
* * *
I walk and on my shoulders my father’s coffin
Whilst my heart exists in his absence a ruin
As the heat pierces my tongue, and senses within
As my arms hold a coffin which my father’s in
Whilst the events of your day in my eyes flashes
When Sajjad walked and at him your head it gazes
Whilst it is severed and this head a spear raises
And he returns to bury you, torn with lashes
* * *
In my father’s absence, left widowed my mother
Narjis Khatoon and without a guide she wanders
And with my absence looming I’ll leave forever
Which hand will hold her heart, which hand will comfort her?
Like Ummul Baneen she sleeps in a house empty
Like Zainab she becomes mother of tragedy
But Zainab walks in a greater calamity
As men stare at her and who’ll turn their eyes away?
* * *
No I have not taught my hands to my beloved,
Bury deep in the ground with all my tears shrouded
Neither my farewell to be properly worded
Nor my tears to turn to blood as I’ve decided
But I do cry blood with each rise of a new dawn
Whilst without a shroud Hussain lies a body torn
Burned by the heat, killed thirsty with blood he’d worn
No shroud upon him and this tale I adorn
* * *
(London – 08/02/11)