poetic jinx

Recently noted: both Sepoy of Chapati Mystery and Uma of indianwriting marked the recent bombings in Delhi by posting poems of Agha Shahid Ali's--"Chandni Chowk, Delhi," and "Lenox Hill." And then a day later, F. put Shahid Ali's translation of Faiz's "Don't Ask Me For That Love Again" on his (private) blog. Then yesterday walking into dear S's room, I found a wall papered with Ali's adaptations of Mahmoud Darwish's sequence "Eleven Stars over Andalusia" from Rooms are Never Finished ('o water be a string to my guitar'....) and annotated here and there in Arabic and/or Urdu. I didn't have to check to know that "Stationery" would be there, too.

Anyone who reads this blog knows I'm a devoted Shahid Ali groupie; two among the meagre supply of books that travelled with me to Turkey were his; three if you count the Faiz translations. I'm not sure why his poems strike me so deeply (I am trying to recall how I encountered them in the first place, and can't; there's just a faint memory of sitting with one book in Elliot Bay Book Co. three or four years ago, completely entranced but also completely broke, and then scouring used bookshops across the cities for secondhand copies....) but this sudden outpouring of appearances is somehow very heartening.