This is some-- I think Mary mentioned the ghazal,
which is a form I've become more and more fond of, which was
especially--
made almost popular in English by the wonderful
Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali,
who died much too young--
a couple of decades ago.
And it's a poem that comes to us mainly from Farsi and Urdu.
And it's written in couplets with a repeated
word and a rhyme word, which is rather tight.
But on the other hand, the couplets
don't really have to be linear in any way, shape, or form.
In fact, they're really supposed not to be.
So one couplet can be erotic, and one can be political,
and one can be about memory, and so on.
Sorry.
A couple of years ago, I was at a conference in Konya in Turkey
about Rumi, who lived in Konya.
And there were people there from the United States,
Turkey, Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, Germany.
And there was a very young woman named Farkhunda
from Afghanistan, who talked about the ghazal
and how when she was a small child,
her father and her uncle and their friends
would drink tea and smoke and recite or sing ghazals
all night long.
And as a child, and a girl child at that,
she wasn't really allowed in.
But she sat outside the door and listened
and memorized as much as she possibly could.
So this poem was written for her.
And one other thing is that, classically, in the ghazal,
the poet is supposed to put some version of his or her name
in the last couplet.
"Laughter, music, voices singing verses
can be heard outside the door.
The little girl is memorizing every word outside the door.
Light in the stairwell, seen through the judas hole.
Is that the visitor you longed for
or you feared outside the door?
Long hours in lamplight, practicing his scales,
in counterpoint to solfege of a bird outside the door.
The diplomat entering the leader's office
forgets the Copt, the communist, the Kurd outside the door.
Praise for the leader, loyalty till death.
Another imprecation is whispered outside the door.
The first love left.
The second packs her bags.
Are those the nervous footsteps of the third outside the door?
Self is a mirror, poster-color bright,
but notice how the colors become blurred outside the door.
The revolutionaries' nameless laundress wonders,
'What happens to a dream deferred?' outside the door."