WEBVTT

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This is some-- I think
Mary mentioned the ghazal,

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which is a form I've become
more and more fond of, which was

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especially--

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made almost popular in
English by the wonderful

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Kashmiri-American
poet Agha Shahid Ali,

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who died much too young--

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a couple of decades ago.

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And it's a poem that comes to
us mainly from Farsi and Urdu.

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And it's written in
couplets with a repeated

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word and a rhyme word,
which is rather tight.

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But on the other
hand, the couplets

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don't really have to be linear
in any way, shape, or form.

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In fact, they're really
supposed not to be.

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So one couplet can be erotic,
and one can be political,

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and one can be about
memory, and so on.

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Sorry.

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A couple of years ago, I was at
a conference in Konya in Turkey

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about Rumi, who lived in Konya.

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And there were people there
from the United States,

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Turkey, Afghanistan,
Iran, Syria, Germany.

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And there was a very young
woman named Farkhunda

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from Afghanistan, who
talked about the ghazal

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and how when she
was a small child,

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her father and her
uncle and their friends

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would drink tea and smoke
and recite or sing ghazals

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all night long.

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And as a child, and
a girl child at that,

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she wasn't really allowed in.

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But she sat outside
the door and listened

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and memorized as much
as she possibly could.

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So this poem was
written for her.

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And one other thing is that,
classically, in the ghazal,

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the poet is supposed to put
some version of his or her name

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in the last couplet.

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"Laughter, music,
voices singing verses

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can be heard outside the door.

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The little girl is memorizing
every word outside the door.

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Light in the stairwell,
seen through the judas hole.

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Is that the visitor
you longed for

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or you feared outside the door?

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Long hours in lamplight,
practicing his scales,

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in counterpoint to solfege
of a bird outside the door.

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The diplomat entering
the leader's office

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forgets the Copt, the communist,
the Kurd outside the door.

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Praise for the leader,
loyalty till death.

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Another imprecation is
whispered outside the door.

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The first love left.

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The second packs her bags.

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Are those the nervous footsteps
of the third outside the door?

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Self is a mirror,
poster-color bright,

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but notice how the colors
become blurred outside the door.

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The revolutionaries'
nameless laundress wonders,

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'What happens to a dream
deferred?' outside the door."

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