Jab ba-taqreeb-e-safar yaar ne mehmil baandha

When for her journey my beloved packed her world apart, The fire of longing fashioned from each grain a heart.

The wise, within her maze of coy and playful art, Saw in the mirror’s soul a wounded, fluttering dart.

My Hope and my Despair required a field for war, So my own failing will, for the beggar at the door, A spell around his pleading spirit forged.

O Ghalib, themes of thirst could not be penned with art, Though to the endless river of my open heart, A limiting and lonely shore was tied.

Ask not the code of those her proud neglect has spurned; The knot her own hands would not touch, she coolly termed A problem far too difficult to be untied.

My love desired the themes a burning thirst would raise, So I laid bare my heart in those impassioned days, And to its boundless river, a new shoreline framed.

The mirror's fever gave my longing wings to soar, And so my love-song, to a heart half-dead and sore, Was fastened, like a message to its fate proclaimed.

From eye to heart, one mirror brightly lit remains; But who, upon her private world of proud disdains, Has forced the festive trappings of a crowd?

My hopelessness, to write of languor and regret, Took the wave's narrow lane, and on that passage set The gaping yawn a weary shoreline is allowed.

O Ghalib, from my very breath, the singer in my soul, To make his instrument profoundly, truly whole, Has strung a thread to play the song of Bidel.

My weakness watches now as my past life goes by, While memory, before my fading, weary eye, Has fixed a mirror where all vanished moments dwell.

Since every thorn-tip sought to steal a wound from me, O Asad, like soft felt, for all the world to see, I bound my very heart onto my sole.