اظہار کی آزادی

“I flipped through their visions,
left my number in their sleep.
But no one called back.
I called all night,
called for years,
called till their lids began to ring,
ten, twenty, two hundred times,
and then they went blind
on my dreams.
Now their eyes don't open.
No one picks up the phone.”
― Agha Shahid Ali, The Veiled Suite: The Collected Poems

“Stationary"

The moon did not become the sun.
It just fell on the desert
in great sheets, reams
of silver handmade by you.
The night is your cottage industry now,
the day is your brisk emporium.
The world is full of paper.

Write to me.”
― Agha Shahid Ali, The Veiled Suite: The Collected Poems

“If you love somebody, let them go, for if they return, they were always yours. If they don't, they never were.”
― Kahlil Gibran

“Then why let anything remain
when whatever we loved
turned instantly to stone?”
― Agha Shahid Ali, A Nostalgist's Map of America: Poems