Jalsaghar
by
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Forever Do you seek, like Jonah, to be elusive forever ~ To live like an ascetic, reclusive forever? You traversed deserts & abide in a mirage, Within the shade of a fig & olive forever. The temple scribe said you were fated to stray In radiant absence, as wind lisps its narrative forever. Sand rises around you, a volatile vacuum ~ O escape To the mind's habitable star, fugitive forever. In a vision you emerge from an emerald sea, immersed In the light that pours through a cloud’s sieve forever. Shahid, I left you sleeping in a bed of light ~ knowing It was I you were destined to forgive forever. Ghazal of the Elephants (In sixth century Kashmir, Mihiragula's men forced elephants off rock cliffs in the Pir Panjal range.) The Hun savored the cry of falling elephants. Did God devise the fate befalling elephants? Songs of nomads depict their slaughter. Peasants recite legends recalling elephants. "Their bones like a structure, majestic in collapse ~ As if once the site of a sandstorm stalling elephants." I recall again their story when I witness A child, on paper, scrawling elephants. Was it Paradise (seen in a blur) God revealed to falling elephants? Into a mirage they now migrate ~ Winds crossing distances, calling elephants.
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About the Book
Praise for Jalsaghar “‘My hands memorize your hourglass waist. /Slow winds pass through distant sands, sifting grains.’ Imagine that beauty rethought in stanza after stanza. The ghazal is the Satie of poetry, sustained by the whirling dervish, its couplets braiding into the brain. Steffen Horstmann’s Jalsaghar is a stunning homage to the late Agha Shahid Ali” (Terese Svoboda, author of Professor Harriman’s Steam Air-Ship). “A rapproachment with a formal tradition demands incisive cultural evaluation; an assay of a formal tradition ‘not one’s own’ demands that one become a naturalized citizen of a nation of poetry. The sure-footedness with which Steffen Horstmann navigates the ghazal form—a kind of poem often misunderstood in Anglophone practice—is a testimony to long and devoted study as well as to Horstmann’s skill as a practitioner, his keen ear, and his passion for the possibilities of the kind of détente poetry offers: a genuine cross-pollination of the music, the landscapes, the souls of distant and yet always kindred lives” (T. R. Hummer, author of Skandalon). “Steffen Horstmann’s book of contemporary ghazals shows us the ways in which form—in this case precise, musical, devotional in its origins—can act as a vehicle for meditation. The rhymes and repetitions of the ghazal are part prayer, part spell, and as such they bind together in language the world of material things and the world of spirit, which is also a world of longing. Agha Shahid Ali brought the tradition of the ghazal into the center of our contemporary and American poetic repertoire; Steffen Horstmann has carried it into our young century, made it new” (Mark Wunderlich, author of The Earth Avails).
About the Author
As Agha Shahid Ali’s student, Steffen Horstmann studied the history of the ghazal form and began writing his own ghazals in English. His poems and book reviews have appeared in publications throughout the world, including Baltimore Review, Free State Review, Istanbul Literary Review, Texas Poetry Journal, and Tiferet.