I Was not Good for Time

(Translation by Muhammad Salim-ur-Rahman)

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