Sandy Solomon: Ghazal

               In memoriam: poet Agha Shahid Ali who 
               advocated for this form in English
 
 
Where was poetry mislaid in New Jersey
but in suburban comfort put and paid in New Jersey?
 
Sluggard train, commuters close across,
not like time, its progress undelayed in New Jersey.
 
Wetlands snake around roads, tracks,
depots, dumps, their fragrant stew and trade in New Jersey.   
 
Tonight in town as friends read your poems,
your voice persists in theirs, those words replayed in New
 Jersey.
 
Not stacked concrete and steel, all hardened edge, 
but creeks, curving shrubs, a long-cast shade in New Jersey.
 
Thistle and tansy scrawl toward orphaned fields
where corn climbs:  a dense and doomed parade in New Jersey.
 
Last year, the farmer ploughed where mansions squeeze,
bay by bay, their panels and panes arrayed in New Jersey.
 
Spring rains raise the lawn ragged.  And here
and there and there: dandelions inlaid in New Jersey.
 
Warehouse stores, blind to the road, enclose
stacked stuff and air; you hear their serenade in New
 Jersey.
 
Each driven errand carts away the days
in plastic bags. What never have I made in New Jersey?
 
One sunlit, pond-side afternoon of books 
clears malled thoughts.  Senses cascade in New Jersey.
 
Foreign affairs?  The students know nothing,
care nothing; yet history is nothing’s blade in New Jersey.
 
Sputtered groans approach, recede, approach,
the hill made close with cars against the grade in New
  Jersey.
 
The surf cleans away an ice cream wrapper
and leaves sunrise, into which we wade in New Jersey.
 
Our dead ones perch.  They sway above this present 
laughter on such sadness!  But dears, don’t fade in New
 Jersey.
 
My room of words measures inches squared,
wide as the world and narrow as afraid in New Jersey.
 
Beneath the bridge at New Hope dingies moor
in swirls of current, lines deployed and played in New
 Jersey.
 
A night of ghazals comes to an end to fill
with birds.  As the sky blues, their calls braid in New
 Jersey.
 
In your luxury of days, shadow, look
from love that’s neither stumped nor strayed in New Jersey.

Copyright 2020 Sandy Solomon

Sandy Solomon’s poems have appeared in such magazines as The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Threepenny Review, The Gettysburg Review, Partisan Review, and Ploughshares.  Her book, Pears, Lake, Sun , won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Award from the University of Pittsburgh Press.

Agha Shahid Ali (1949 – 2001) was a poet from the highly educated Agha family of Srinagar, Kashmir. Shahid, who taught at a number of American universities, died of brain cancer and was buried in Northampton, Massachusetts, in the vicinity of Amherst, a town sacred to his beloved poet Emily Dickinson. His collections include A Walk Through the Yellow Pages, The Half-Inch Himalayas, A Nostalgist’s Map of America, The Country Without a Post Office, and Rooms Are Never Finished. Shahid’s seminal essay “The Ghazal in America: May I?” influenced a number of American poets to adopt the ancient Arabic form.