Fragments From "To The Songbird (By Ghulam Nabi Firaq)"

     

           But you are curious, songbird--
without a word your extravagant voice
is inside; and you cry, and when all is
alive with the abrupt rumor of you
my haunted heart, a wild thing, leaps,
near the least spasm of time:
                  it suspends me here
for my world is not now what it was.


of a moment with your moving song
here seems the rose, and all your creatures of song,
all as of noise and the flourish of spring...

I wandered far--it was a Greek play
that consumed my mind, where I lost
my self, wetting invention, feeding taste ...