I Was not Good for Time

I was not good for Time. Time therefore stood against me. An old man and an old woman loved me but time stroked them into an everlasting sleep and I kept sitting by them. Then a woman and a man kept me close to their hearts but time aged them. and their hearts thinned and weakened. I fell in love with a young woman but when beauty bloomed to its full and its tresses touched the heart. time dragged us towards dusk. so much so that brambles choked the green bowers. I adored and loved little children but when they grew up, time lured them to diverse vocations and they wrapped me up in a sheet of decay. That small, crude hill was not made of emerald and blue stones. It was plain earth and rock which held in its lap an evergreen mulberry tree and in the gorge close to it was a pond. and across was the high ground where we played till the sun went down; where fear crept into the nights. All this remains where it was  but time has placed in the farthest dimension and I cannot see it anymore. In a reed-basket. the child who was being carried, inside his eyelids, were blisters which were pierced by a fresh, rough cloth and the eyes had bled. People had mourned at the loss of his sight. Fate had mourned on its endurance. Who was he..? And the woman who carried that basket: where were her roots and in whose image was she reflected…? I was not good for Time, That is why it stood against me. Where I was to be the witness, Time erased me and where I was not to be, Time placed me there. When plague struck and terrified people went to live in huts far a way from their homes, I was not there. When two people were being clamped to the press and tortured. and in the hall of royal audience they openly demanded their release. I was not there. When fighting erupted between two tribes near a deep chasm in the mountain and a man had his head severed the second time over, I was not there. When at midnight he went down into the ravine in the valley, where genii. cast out like children with exposed tummies and bare buttocks sat in a circle with a lantern lit in the middle. I was not there. But when for the last time, with a coloured cloth tied around his waist. wearing a pointed gold-embroidered shoe, mounted on a black horse. a slave with sceptre by his side. he started off for the west. then turned north. and in the cemetery where coloured rags clung to prickly trees. quietly, he went to sleep in a grave.  I was there Translated by Muhammad Salim-ur-rahman