Ghazal of Sayyid Kamal

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Title:     Ghazal of Sayyid Kamal
Author: Edward Powys Mathers [More Titles by Mathers]

I am burning, I am crumbled into powder,
I stand to the lips in a tossing sea of tears.

Like a stone falling in Hamun lake I vanish;
I return no more, I am counted among the dead.

I am consumed like yellow straw on red flames;
You have drawn a poisoned sword along my throat to-day.

People have come to see me from far towns,
Great and small, arriving with bare heads,
For I have become one of the great historical lovers.

In the desire of your red lips
My heart has become a red kiln, like a terrace of roses.
It is because she does not trouble about the bee on the rose
That my heart is taken.

"I have blackened my eyes to kill you, _Sayyid Kamal_.
I kill you with my eyelids; I am Natarsa, the Panjabie, the pitiless."

From the Pus'hto (Afghans, nineteenth century).

-THE END-
Edward Mathers's Poem: Ghazal of Sayyid Kamal

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