Home > Poetry Magazine > Land

Poetry Magazine

POEM
RELATED CONTENT Discover this poem's context and related poetry.

Land

By Agha Shahid Ali 1949–2001

For Christopher Merrill

Swear by the olive in the God-kissed land—

There is no sugar in the promised land.

Why must the bars turn neon now when, Love,

I’m already drunk in your capitalist land?

If home is found on both sides of the globe,

home is of course here—and always a missed land.

The hour’s come to redeem the pledge (not wholly?)

in Fate’s "Long years ago we made a tryst" land.

Clearly, these men were here only to destroy,

a mosque now the dust of a prejudiced land.

Will the Doomsayers die, bitten with envy,

when springtime returns to our dismissed land?

The prisons fill with the cries of children.

Then how do you subsist, how do you persist, Land?

“Is my love nothing for I’ve borne no children?”

I’m with you, Sappho, in that anarchist land.

A hurricane is born when the wings flutter ...

Where will the butterfly, on my wrist, land?

You made me wait for one who wasn’t even there

though summer had finished in that tourist land.

Do the blind hold temples close to their eyes

when we steal their gods for our atheist land?

Abandoned bride, Night throws down her jewels

so Rome—on our descent—is an amethyst land.

At the moment the heart turns terrorist,

are Shahid’s arms broken, O Promised Land?

Agha Shahid Ali, “Land” from Call Me Ishmael Tonight: A Book of Ghazals. Originally published in Poetry (July 2001). Copyright © 2001 by Agha Shahid Ali. Reprinted with the permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. This selection may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Source: Poetry (July 2001).

Biography

Agha Shahid Ali was born in New Delhi, India in 1949. He grew up in Kashmir, the son of a distinguished and highly educated family in Srinagar. He attended the University of Kashmir, the University of Delhi and, upon arriving in the United States in 1975, Pennsylvania State University and the University of Arizona. Though a Kashmiri Muslim, Ali is best known in the U.S. and identified himself as an American poet writing in . . .

Continue reading this biography