Songs of Light

5/5 - (3 votes)

Author: Ayaz Rasool Nazki
Pages: 104
Year of Publication: 2017
Price: Rs 200
ISBN: 978-93-5045-150-2 (9789350451502)

About the Author:
Professor Ayaz Rasool Nazki is the Regional Director at Indian Council for Cultural Relations, Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India, in Srinagar, Kashmir. He comes from a family of scholars and poets, was trained as a biological scientist, and taught science. He has written both poetry and prose in Kashmiri and Urdu, and has published a number of volumes of poetry in these languages. His other works include a novel, which is in the final stages of production and a translation of a selection of his father, the legendary poet-scholar Mir Ghulam Rasool Nazki’s classic Kashmiri rubayiaat or quatrains into English, titled Echo. Songs of Light is his first collection of English poems.

Both in his poetry and prose, Professor Nazki essentially represents Kashmir: its ethos, its pain, its past, present and future. The poems in this volume also provide a glimpse into the mind of an artist totally wedded to his land and the consciousness that it represents.

Teaser:

Random Thoughts

Let us meet somewhere,
it has been ages since
we sat on the steps
of the ghat and watched boats
ferry across loads of men,
women and children
all on their way to somewhere.

If we make it today
to the same ghat
let us enquire from the waves
and ripples on the water
about all those men,
women and children
who had crossed the span;
what happened then?
who met whom and who came home?

It has been ages,
generations have come
and generations have gone
a thousand suns have risen and sunk
into the water in front of me.

A lonely, dull moon hangs there
outside my window,
the chill in the air cuts a sinew,
I am frozen to the core,
my friend has sent me a note
on Facebook
in an alien tongue
which I can’t read.

People are the same
making families
raising children
building homes
opening accounts in
the nearest banks.

My papers lie on the table
the tax return, the unpaid bills
the medical insurance
and my will
yet unwritten.

Reviews of the book can be read in The Hindu  and Muse India.

Contents:
68 poems

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