POETRY SALMAN
SOWD AGAR
The Muezzin’s Call Deep in slumber, It hits my ear, The muezzin's call, From behind the minaret's wall, Summoning for the dawn prayer. The sound very faint though, In a flash opens my eyes, In surprise. "Whoa! There's no minaret here." Why? Not a mosque, In this dreary desert, The Thar, Where the feet only feels the sand, And the eye only sees, A few lonely huts, Scattered here and there. I had moved into one of them, The last towards the west, Not before yesterday, To collect sandstone, And carry it to the nearest town, To use in construction. I was afraid, My eyes won't open, Early in the morn, To quickly start my day's work, And wrap it up, Before the sun reached The middle of the sky, And to leave the hot desert Before it got any hotter, For the town, Only to return after dusk. But here I was Already up In the wee hours, Because of the muezzin's call.
14 CultureCult Magazine New Year 2019
SALMAN SOWDAGAR lives in Hyderabad, India. His work has appeared in magazines like Verse of Silence, The Bombay Review, The Criterion, and in anthologies like The World Anthology of Poetry 2016 (released as a part of The 32nd World Congress of Poets in Taiwan), The Hall of Poets Anthology, Asian Poetry Anthology, among others. He is studying English Literature from IGNOU.
I walk out of my shack, Into the sandy air, Which blinds my vision. But my ears good enough, To catch again and again, The faint voice of the muezzin. After a lot of struggle, When the winds slowed their pace, I see through the dawn-dark desert, Into the direction of the call, Not with exactitude. After a few anxious turns of my head, I see a speck of light, Miles away. A light so light, One can barely notice, Unless it's a moonless night. It surely belonged to a mosque. "Which town is that?" I wonder, And in the next tick of the clock, As in a response to my thoughts, A lightning flashes across the sky, For a few fleeting moments, Laying bare to me, Somewhere halfway towards that light, The electric fences, That divide India and Pakistan. "Good heavens! That mosque is in Pakistan," I utter in utter disbelief. But its azan reaches my land, And has actually woke me up, On time for my work. A Pakistani muezzin helping his Indian brother. I look up to the sky, And thank the Almighty, For giving me such a lovely neighbour. And then I pray, "Let the two brothers continue To love and serve each other, In ways the world will never know." []
ART A panel from Max Slevogt’s ‘Sandstorm in the Libyan Desert’