The last straw

Category: Poetry
With burning indignation life here ending,
I imprecate my cruel destiny.
Why, Mother, did you cherish me and tend me?
Why was your loving eyes’ light shed on me?
To feed me at your breast was worse than useless,
To croon to me at night — an idle jest,
Those songs are now just maledictions fruitless,
In my embittered and indignant breast.
Now tell me, life, did I not all privations,
So long as I had strength and tears, endure?
But tears are at an end now, and my patience
As well’s exhausted. I can bear no more.
Even the beasts that in the field run boisterous,
Can wallow in the stream and drink when dry,
But I have nothing my parched throat to moisten,
From suffocating fever I choke and die.
Deprived of friendship am I — a pariah,
And on my wrists the heavy fetters lie,
Deprived of sun am I... and at my dying
No rays of it I feel upon my eyes.
Alright, I’ll die, but die one thing regretting,
That I my daughter, once again shan’t see,
And, on my mother’s grave myself prostrating,
Shall lie no more — Would that these things might be!
Why has my prison now become my tombstone?
Why is the couch I lie on stained with gore?
Could it then be because the earth I loved so,
That I am grudged its warmth for evermore?
O Life, I thought you, ever were my Leila,
I loved you, and a Mejnun was for you,
But my naive, confiding spirit stealing,
You’ve thrown it to the curs to be consumed.
You’ve snatched me from my native soil so dear,
You’ve made me suffer in a foreign land,
I sob and sob, but not a single tear
Will fall upon my native country’s strand.
O land of mine, see what a bitter orphan
Is dying, tortured in this foreign clime.
O may this stream of tears to you come pouring,
And may my blood rise as a radiant bloom.
October 1943