From The Independent.co.uk

Robert Fisk: If this is a US victory, does that mean its forces should go home now?

So why are we in Afghanistan? Didn't the Americans and the British go there in 2001 to fight Osama bin Laden? Wasn't he killed on Monday? There was painful symbolism in the Nato airstrike yesterday – scarcely 24 hours after Bin Laden's death – that killed yet more Afghan security guards. For the truth is that we long ago lost the plot in the graveyard of empires, turning a hunt for a now largely irrelevant inventor of global jihad into a war against tens of thousands of Taliban insurgents who have little interest in al-Qa'ida, but much enthusiasm to drive Western armies out of their country.

The gentle hopes of Hamid Karzai and Hillary Clinton – that the Taliban will be so cowed by the killing of Bin Laden that they will want to become pleasant democrats and humbly join the Western-supported and utterly corrupt leadership of Afghanistan – shows just how out of touch they are with the blood-soaked reality of the country. Some of the Taliban admired Bin Laden, but they did not love him and he had been no part of their campaign against Nato. Mullah Omar is more dangerous to the West in Afghanistan than Bin Laden. And we haven't killed Omar.

Iran, for once, spoke for millions of Arabs in its response to Bin Laden's death. "An excuse for alien countries to deploy troops in this region under the pretext of fighting terrorism has been eliminated," its foreign ministry spokesman has said. "We hope this development will end war, conflict, unrest and the death of innocent people, and help to establish peace and tranquility in the region."

Newspapers across the Arab world said the same thing. If this is such a great victory for the United States, it's time to go home; which, of course, the US has no intention of doing just now.

That many Americans think the same thing is not going to change the topsy-turvy world in which US policy is framed. For there is one home truth which the world still has not grasped: that the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt – and, more pressing, the bloodbaths in Libya and Syria and the dangers to Lebanon – are of infinitely graver importance than blowing away a bearded man who has been elevated in the West's immature imagination into Hitlerian proportions.

Turkish prime minister Erdogan's brilliant address in Istanbul yesterday – calling for the Syrians to stop killing their people and for Gaddafi to leave Libya – was more eloquent, more powerful and more historic than the petty, boastful, Hollywood speeches of Obama and Clinton on Monday. We are now wasting our time speculating who will "take over" al-Qa'ida – Zawahiri or Saif al-Adel – when the movement has no "leadership" as such, Bin Laden being the founder rather than the boss.

But, a day being a long time in the killing fields of the Middle East, just 24 hours after Osama Bin Laden died, other questions were growing thicker yesterday. If, for example, Barack Obama really thinks the world is "a safer place" after Bin Laden's death, how come the US has increased its threat alert and embassies around the world are being told to take extra precautions against attack?

And just what did happen in that tatty compound – no longer, it seems, a million-dollar "mansion" – when Bin Laden's sulphurous life was brought to an end? Human Rights Watch is unlikely to be the only institution to demand a "thorough, transparent investigation" into the killing.

There was an initial story from Pentagon "sources" which had two of Bin Laden's wives killed and a woman held as a "human shield" dying too. Within hours, the wives were alive and in some accounts, the third woman simply disappeared.

And then of course, there's Pakistan, eagerly telling the world that it participated in the attack on Bin Laden, only to have President Zardari retract the entire story yesterday. Two hours later, we had an American official describing the attack on Bin Laden as a "shared achievement".

And there's Bin Laden's secret burial in the Arabian Sea. Was this planned before the attack on Bin Laden, with the clear plan to kill rather than capture him? And if it was carried out "according to Islamic rights" – the dead man's body washed and placed in a white shroud – it must have taken a long time for the officer on the USS Carl Vinson to devise a 50-minute religious ceremony and arrange for an Arabic-speaking sailor to translate it.

So now for a reality check. The world is not safer for Bin Laden's killing. It is safer because of the winds of freedom blowing through the Middle East. If the West treats the people of this region with justice rather than military firepower, then al-Qa'ida becomes even more irrelevant than it has been since the Arab revolutions.

Of course, there is one positive side for the Arab world. With Bin Laden killed, the Gaddafis and the Salehs and the Assads will find it all the more difficult to claim that a man who is now dead is behind the popular revolutions trying to overthrow them.

Wednesday, 4 May 2011

Images

Summer trotted up the stairs, mid-afternoon
Smelling of patched memory
Weaving its way, precariously,
Out of distant, neatly cursive clouds
Spaced out like Dickinson's carefully meted verse
On the arched, gray-blue south-east.


The pale pink of a birthday bouquet
Crept out of alstroemerias
And drove off to the grocers
Looking to barter -
Uninvited affection, for a morsel of cheap hope.


The memory of a moonlit night
Stirred the gathering gloom
Glowing ghostly, like the struggling sun
Overtaken by thick, steel-gray, coastal city-fog.
Memory - spiked with citrus vodka, go-karts and disillusionment.


Truth made a reckless leap,
From glossed lips to a curly haired shoulder
And huddled, whimpering like a hurt puppy
In a corner of wood-brown, insecure, escapist eyes.
Dashed dreams were wiped on a napkin
discarded hopelessly, at the lunch table.


April 23rd & 24th, 2011.

If you come by...

by Rukhiya Faheem. (One of the greatest poems I've read)


My tongue has grown a rough red,
That color of prison walls-
It nibbles off punctured dreams
And burrows, leaving dust in my marrow.
I’ve grown fainter, but cozier,
For such lifelessness is rampant.

I’ve recalled too much, of us
In the span of a stolen bit of paper.
Carved several children
Out of a dense nebulous memory.

Contained all our decaying causes in a jar,
And let my cares rub over smooth stones
So, I could slip onto them this
Bitter taste of a prolonged promise.

If you come by, bring me, but one thing -
An innocent hollow night,
Which cannot be filled
To a full.

Madeeha

[A birthday gift by Rukhiya Faheem.]

I should wish to call you a fairy
If we both could dismiss the garish curves of her sorcery.

I delight in you, your colors
The stretch of your smile
The waves of your voice
That seem to breach, gently.
Undo and untie my webs, set me breathing
And then as you leave, you keep the doors ajar and approachable to bored spiders until I am calling from the stickiness.

You write and say words that fill me to my fingertips and then are kind to listen to the same from my mouth.
I wish to compare you to the morning flowers, to the depths of rivers, to the scarceness of peace, to bareness, to the overwhelming dramas on the skies herearound and to several everyday things.
I also wish to convey all this without actively conveying.
(Since we’ve haven’t met yet, you might not notice my shortcomings)

The Sun at dawn and dusk,
The white of the moon, and the early stars
The dull buzz of a bee
The red of strawberries
The not-poised-on-the-tip-of-my-tongue things
Are you, in different forms.

Like all our abrupt ends I’ll sign off from this dialogue with this-
What swirls in me and then rests pleasantly on my heart
Is love, I am certain
For myself and to what it could be (that is you.)

Spring by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Spring

TO what purpose, April, do you return again?

Beauty is not enough.

You can no longer quiet me with the redness

Of little leaves opening stickily.

I know what I know.

The sun is hot on my neck as I observe

The spikes of the crocus.

The smell of the earth is good.

It is apparent that there is no death.

But what does that signify?

Not only under ground are the brains of men

Eaten by maggots.

Life in itself

Is nothing,

An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.

It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,

April

Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

Edna St. Vincent Millay



http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap110401.html

Oranges - by Gary Soto

The first time I walked
With a girl, I was twelve,
Cold, and weighted down
With two oranges in my jacket.
December. Frost cracking
Beneath my steps, my breath
Before me, then gone, 
As I walked toward
Her house, the one whose 
Porch light burned yellow
Night and day, in any weather.
A dog barked at me, until
She came out pulling 
At her gloves, face bright
With rouge. I smiled,
Touched her shoulder, and led 
Her down the street, across
A used car lot and a line 
Of newly planted trees,
Until we were breathing
Before a drugstore. We
Entered, the tiny bell
Bringing a saleslady
Down a narrow aisle of goods.
I turned to the candies
Tiered like bleachers,
And asked what she wanted–
Light in her eyes, a smile
Starting at the corners
Of her mouth. I fingered
A nickel in my pocket,
And when she lifted a chocolate
That cost a dime,
I didn’t say anything.
I took the nickel from 
My pocket, then an orange,
And set them quickly on 
The counter. When I looked up,
The lady’s eyes met mine, 
And held them, knowing 
Very well what it was all 
About.
Outside,
A few cars hissing past,
Fog hanging like old
Coats between the trees.
I took my girl’s hand
In mine for two blocks,
Then released it to let
Her unwrap the chocolate.
I peeled my orange
That was so bright against
The gray of December
That, from some distance,
Someone might have thought
I was making a fire in my hands.

-Gary Soto

http://matthewkaberline.blogspot.com/2008/04/gary-soto-oranges.html

The painful beauty of empathy...

As Dreamers do

Snow no more, it will soon.

Someone will walk, drag their weary body yet

From a mid-May springtime, to a scorching June

Where the blundering, mystifying, greening rains

Light up hearts with a thousand colors –

In a land where it snows not.

Come February, and fist-sized Sambal

Shall paint the dried up, mist-borne landscape –

A flaming rouge…

Someone will pause, pause amidst the splendor

And smile for snowflakes

Those tiny memoirs of a cold cold warmth.

Dreamers shall weave newer dreams yet,

With their novel amalgamated palette –

Blending the light of longed-for sun-rays

Into the magical romance of soul-drenching rains.

Sun and rain –

Rainbows, myriads of splinters of color

Shall burst forth from a frail presence.

Someone will have the leisure,

The leisure and the heart –

To twirl a thought in their fingers

Just long enough

To paint a canvas yet.

More verses shall be written yet.

Feb 13^th, 2011.

Buffalo's Skyline from my Window

So what are the things buffalonians could spot?

1.St. Ann's Church 
2. St. Stanislaus Bishop & Martyr Church
3. The not-yet-risen Sun
4. Clouds - the weavers of magic
5. Countless windmills in the land far far away...


Hmmm... will have to inquire for more :)

There was a time... We were beautiful

Beautifully magical poetry (by Ahmed Shameem) sung by one of the loveliest of voices (Nayyara Noor):

Once... We were beautiful

Here follows an effort at translation that cannot do justice, but the colors seem to shine through even in a different language.

Note: "Us" and "We" are sometimes used in urdu as slightly impersonal substitutes for "Me" and "I". In this poem they seem kindof an effort to divert attention and sound less narcisstic, thought the use can have many meanings depending on context.

Once... We were beautiful

There was a time... We were beautiful

There was a time... We were beautiful

Like the lasting scent settled in oft-read books

Our breaths were hushed.

With the palette of a myriad unsaid words,

We used to paint murals.

On the wings of warblers, we'd carve poems

And sing them... to nestlers on far-off lakes...

Who lived far far from us...

yet were so near our hearts...

When labors of another day

Alighted in our garden, with the light of dawn

We used to say:

"Mama! these butterflies have such pretty wings".

Oh dear, kiss us...

Kiss us on the forehead

For we long to soar to the lands of

Butterflies,

Fireflies...

For rainbow fireflies,

Butterflies of light... beckon us thither...

Labors of another day mingle

With gentle breeze drenched in color

And beckon us through the window...

Oh dear, kiss us...

Kiss us on the forehead

Kiss us on the forehead...

Nothing

Borrowed from http://rukhiya.blogspot.com/2010/08/nothing.html ... where thousands of miles away, the quivering tenderness of a woman's pint of murmuring blood resonates with the epileptic beating of my own diffident, too easily trusting, hopelessly dreamy heart:

[ Stumbled upon this one. Written not too long ago, I think ]
Now. This moment here. I want to write.Writing mustn't be a want, it must be natural, but I am unsure of using the word 'mustn't'. Must and must-not are just too exhausting to peg onto my fingertips. My thoughts, my only constant companions were waiting, floating like huge gas filled balloons on a lake, and now that I wish to rescue them they have streaked out into their original darker colors. Sometimes I can't draw comparisions and my metaphors and similies are absurd.

I've been thinking of many things, new and old. Several words have redefined their tight meanings and settled in new voluminous formless clouds. Several people have come and left, and some keep coming and going. Each time, they alter something, misplace a thought or two and in the end I am comfortable about gaining on more misplaced thoughts. One more feeling which will perhaps make the knowledge of myself more understandable. I've been thinking of you and I don't fear reading this a little later in my life. You could become more than you are by then or become several times lesser. Who's to say. I couldn't believe myself though it was me and entirely me who froze in time and then one day wore summer on her sleeves. I outshone my own dullness and thus proved that I can let things go.Of course I have you. You, who seem everything. I do not see you yet, as a God. I see your absence, like a crater in my soul. Like something that grew on the surface of my soul has been removed.

But then, there is hope. Hope, is so new, so surprising in its magnitude. The moment it stepped into me, it paralysed several doubts. Hope itself, is so scary though. Why do we have a word like blind-hope, isn't all hope blind or isn't it hope that blinds a person? I am yet to know if my hope can see. I am on the course. The course which is blind, uncertain. Things I love must guide me.

Then there is courage, another word that is acting strange. I had known it, yes. I have called myself courageous on several occasions. This time though it seems to empower me, silent. I feel strong, and it has got nothing to do with muscles and their girth. I am returning to the words you said, Hope. Yes, leave that to me. Rather, let me have a share of it. I might as well hope. I do not see anything from here. Several years hence I do not know what this will looked upon as. If you read this now, I do not know how I will be looked upon. Perhaps, it'll fall as a pebble in a sleeping lake, or perhaps it'll come as a tide. Somehow I think the world must've been upturned. I think we might be hanging from the ground and water too hangs from the sea-bed, perhaps the air around us is thick oil and it lets us be. I cannot justify it though.

I now think of countries, warring, divisions. I think of living in a country that is not mine.I think of you outside your country and I do not like it. I think of us, in a room and getting bored of each other yet I long for your presence. [What is getting bored of each other? We might not talk too much but too much is what makes things boring.] Imagination or hallucination or whatever they call it is wonderfully spacious. It is never too small to hold the zillion figments of my future, the real and the unreal one. I claim that I never write what I do not see. But I do, I fear I will today too. Since I have some invisible part of me stay with you and it tells me the experience. And it scares me that I've given my senses, my perceptions to you, to stay with you, to be guided by you.I cannot, though, give myself entirely, or so I tell to give my unseen ego a temporary pleasure. I can see it smile from a nook, seems more like a mock. On a nice winter day when it can't snow since I live on the uncomfortable latitude it rains and that brings enough pleasant weather to me. I have been willing to continue but I fear I might recourse it, lest I say too much. I have quite forgotten the repercussions that follow a fountain of speech. I look at myself near a fountain, gathering the sprinkling water. I would like that. I might strike out or go back on a word or two. I might write an opaque poem. I might stop a rain. I might stop the Earth from turning. I might want you. In acknowledgement of the calmth you've brought to me. The calmth that envelopes all the words I have dug up from the mud. Beauty is too heavy and pompous a word to convey the subtlety. I wish to live.Like the passing of a night, I wish to die.

Winter in Buffalo

[Random images transliterated into rhyme
Splatter, like midgets, on the windshield of an eye,
An observant, memorizing, recollecting eye.]

Snow -
Falling muffled, like a thick, plush curtain
Or frail, in a walled alcove, like rain
Snowflakes -
Jubilantly whirling around streetlights
A swarm of middle-aged, wayward locusts
Snow dust -
Rippling, like wind-borne mist on asphalt
Interplay of its waves, paused to a halt
between random tracks of dogs, men and rust...

In a purple twilight land,
Where darkness descends at tea-time
Like a flooded, impatient waterfall
on a beach of dark white sand.

Dec 7th & 11th, 2010.

Under the White Moon’s Shadow

Under the shadow of a white, waxing, mammoth moon,
Looming over distant square edifices,
Fall has creeped onto the shoulders of leaves,
Peeling away green,
Revealing petulant yellows
Mortified by licks of rouge.

The slanting sun rains down
The last of its light
Taming the breeze, brimful
Of the first real chill of the season.

A lone white toy glider
Somersaults,
Owning the blue endlessness
Of fall’s cloud-less evening.

Swaying alone among the sea of grass,
I christen it the ‘Soli-tree’
As the yolk of october sun recedes,
Behind it, through it.

Flamboyant dawns etch images
Permanently,
On pixels – that struggle to diminish
Noise, in ruby rainbows at dusk.

Sometimes, after one has been,
Places where one has to be,
Joy and peace in life, cease being a measure
Of what will life be like, a year thenceforth.

Sometimes, after one has done,
Things that one has to do,
Wayward wind wafts a random fountain’s spray
Painting partial rainbows where one ambles onward.

Sep 21st & Oct 17th, 2010.

High-Pass Filter

Dates.
Does it matter much if you can’t recall ‘em?
That day, when clouds painted the sky in odd patches,
Faint drizzle sharpened the fall foliage,
Grumbling drivers huddled in their hatchbacks.

Names.
Does it matter much if you can’t recall ‘em?
That noon, when an odd girl in cowboy boots, hair flowing,
Walked into this lunch café, unsure of the menu,
Wanting to be, somewhere she could slurp.

Clothes.
Does it matter much if you can’t recall ‘em?
All those times, when your eyes rested softly instead
On curling hair, on an unusual dirt-less sole,
On the lilting strings of a fluted conversation.

Receipts.
Does it matter much if you didn’t keep ‘em?
The first this and the final that,
The day you couldn’t find the way back,
The post card that never reached you...
.
.
.

Leaps.
Does it not matter much if you still feel them?
A certain song bringing your heart to your mouth,
A memory twinkling embers into oft-brooding eyes,
A goodbye coursing like blood through your veins.


Sep 27th & Oct 10th, 2010.

The Lost Voice

I must pull it out,
From the maze of scattered answers
Interspersed with cluttered questions.
My singing voice has been hiding,
Its timid tales untold.

So much has been,
From that purple-pink pre-dawn
To the raging rising of a warm fall sun.
From the jagged cracks on the flat river
Where the sun,
Slicing slick shafts through multi-tiered clouds
Painted the water iridescent green
And somber blue…
To the sand, creeping into hang-nails
With the intimidating rise of oceanic waves
Smelling of distant, day-old crabs.

Meanderings have recycled my being,
Afresh, to the last sedate molecule.

I now dream... despair not.

Sep 14th, 2010.

Stories of a Day

Souls are like lone pebbles,
Oval, batardish, mud-swept.
Or a week old motley bruise,
Blue, burgundy, sickly yellow.

Sometimes, the dark night,
Casting shadows into uninhabited rooms
Smiles
Like a perfectly curled white lily.

A silent, abashed, sorry tear,
Rolls down with a gleam –
The gleam that is signature –
Of pearls,
Of soap bubbles,
Of patience.

Slow breeze whisks away,
An unasked question –
And sprinkles it on the stars,
On the distant, half-hearted moon.

Insomnia explains itself –
Quietly, effortlessly,
With an imperceptible smile
Lingering into dawn.

Manifold voices -
Of a color-splashed day;
Smells of helpless longing –
Punctuating a pair of pupils;
Fall –
On an attentive eye,
And are serenely dismissed.

Crude earthiness wins,
Hands down
Over patient dignity.

Misgivings vanish like smoke
The air blooms with laughter.

Answers are rolled up
Like tongues,
And swallowed.

Among so many stories told,
So much randomness said,
Flirting is overlooked,
Confessions are lost in translations.

One whimsical heart continues,
Its tipped preference
Awaiting a better day.

July 11, 2010.