sitaish-gar hai zahid is qadar jis bagh-e-rizwan ka

The paradise the zealot praises in his pious strain— For us, the self-forgotten, is a bouquet on oblivion's forgotten lane.

How can I speak of the cruelty her digging lashes rain? Each drop of my own blood a coral prayer-bead becomes, a sacred, crimson chain.

The killer’s power could not stop my lamenting cries of pain; The straw I bit in surrender, the reed of a sad flute becomes, to echo my refrain.

If time allows, I'll stage a show to make my meaning plain; Each scar upon my heart a seed for a forest of lamps becomes, a cypress lit by flame.

Your radiance has remade this hall of mirrors, this domain; Like sun on a world of dewdrops, the whole of it becomes a bright and fragile plane.

Within my very making, the seeds of my own ruin have lain; The farmer’s warm blood the stuff of harvest-burning lightning becomes, the thunder and the rain.

Behold the desolation: wild green has overgrown the lane; My gatekeeper's only duty now is pulling weeds; his watch becomes a task mundane.

My silence hides a million murdered longings, cruelly slain; I am a burnt-out lamp upon a pauper's grave, where my darkness becomes their pain.

A faint trace of my love’s imagined form does still remain; My frozen heart, like Joseph’s cell in that dark prison, becomes a sacred, hopeful fane.

You must be sleeping with another, somewhere, it is plain; Or else your secret smile, which haunts my dreams, becomes a source of jealous pain.

Who knows whose very lifeblood was destroyed by all this strain? To see your lashes wet with tears a final tragedy becomes, for one already slain.

Oh Ghalib, I see only one path: annihilation's plain; It is the thread that binds the scattered universe, that which becomes the whole again.