ہم بارانی لوگ ہیں

One Response

1. What will they do to us?

   We are from the arid areas
   They don’t know
   we never leave our fields, seasons and the graveyards
   Like the shrubberies
   we keep on growing yields after yields
   They sprinkle the newest chemicals
   to exterminate us, but
   to no avail
   The pesticides
   cannot do us any harm
   Wherever we go
   we take along our soil, our foliage

   We are from the arid areas
   They don’t know,
   we may be living in the cities
   but our climate is enriched with
   the aroma of acacia flowers
   and over our heads
   there remains the shade of rosewood tree, always
   We are not afraid of the scorching sunlight
   and the torrential rains
   We are never alone or a few
   the entire village stands behind us
   They’ll never get to know the reason
   behind our tall doorways, open courtyards, long foyers
   big hearts and hardened bodies
   We are the trails
   losing our trails into the settlements
   and we are the common land by the villages
   their computers cannot identify us
   We are like the trees, meadows and
   July clouds
   and to get to our pugmarks
   they’ll have to carry out a census
   on the entire Earth and the sky

   We are from the arid areas
   we do know for sure
   they’ll kill us in the papers
   they’ll drag us into the FIRs and the order-sheets
   and they’ll tax even our slightest and unnoticeable
   movements and gestures
   They’ll file us one day after
   our numerous visits to the offices,
   police stations and the district-courts
   But they don’t know
   we are from the arid areas
   growing and flourishing is in our nature
   We’ll get out of their daily-diaries and
   spread into every house, every alley and every town
   We’ll grow like the graves
   out of land-filled plots
   leveled for the skyscrapers!!

   Poem by Naseer Ahmed Nasir
   English translation by Kamran Awan