Shadab Zeest Hashmi
Shadab Zeest Hashmi is the winner of numerous awards and distinctions including the San Diego Book Award, Sable’s Hybrid Book Prize, the Nazim Hikmet Poetry Prize, and multiple nominations for the Pushcart Prize. Her books include poetry collections Kohl and Chalk and Baker of Tarifa, and a volume of essays and poetry titled Ghazal Cosmopolitan which has been praised by Marilyn Hacker as "a marvelous interweaving of poetry, scholarship, literary criticism and memoir." Comb, her latest book, is a lyric memoir selected by Julia Bouwsma (the Poet Laureate of the state of Maine) as the Best Hybrid Book 2019. Zeest Hashmi's poetry has been featured in festivals such as the Seeds of Peace concert in Portland (US), and in Museum exhibits such as the Victorian Radicals at the Birmingham Museum (UK) and a Photography/Film screening at the Imperial War Museum in Manchester (UK) in 2024. She represents Pakistan on UniVerse: A United Nations of Poetry, and her poems have been translated into Spanish, Turkish, Urdu and Bosnian. She has guest-edited several anthologies, including San Diego Poetry Ink, MahMag and Pratik. Her poetry and nonfiction have appeared in publications worldwide, most recently in McSweeney's In the Shape of a Human Body I am Visiting the Earth, The Best Asian Poetry 2021, Verse Daily, Wasafiri, Best Spiritual Literature (Orison) and In the New Century: An Anthology of Pakistani Literature in English (Oxford).
Ghazal of the Superstitious Darling
You brush your long hair far from the oak, the tamarind’s shadow, my superstitious darling
You spit and toss the tangled tresses to be safe from the jinn, and all that’s vicious, darling
Bad luck vaulted across your obsidian threshold (a velvety cat romping with a rabbit foot),
tied itself into the knots of your trousseau rug which we’d thought auspicious, darling
What message was encrypted in a woolen rug by weaving weed into rose, ash into flame?
This lovely handspun contention is no less than an extravagant hint, my judicious darling
Not the kohl dot on your neck, not the hand trained to wave thrice to avert your demons
Not esfand, not turmeric, kept you from being eaten— fate’s maw is malicious, darling
You struck the enemies with shock and awe, smoked them out of their living rooms
They cast the evil eye just before execution when you were least suspicious, darling
You ordered robes of fire-proof textiles, goblets of amethyst, amulets of bloodstone
Your superpower-needs for protection left the planet bankrupt, my ambitious darling
Look, the lovely tropical paisleys, the arctic-blue blossoms on your trousseau rug
No nuptial bliss as exquisite as art— the true magic carpet ride, my capricious darling
Zeest, come, unravel the day to the song of the koel, the magpie, the scent of wild moss
You’ve burnt the sage, sprinkled the salt— let them wish the harm they wish us, darling
This ghazal is an Ekphrastic ghazal, inspired by an image of a hairbrush lying on a Persian rug.
You brush your long hair far from the oak, the tamarind’s shadow, my superstitious darling
You spit and toss the tangled tresses to be safe from the jinn, and all that’s vicious, darling
Bad luck vaulted across your obsidian threshold (a velvety cat romping with a rabbit foot),
tied itself into the knots of your trousseau rug which we’d thought auspicious, darling
What message was encrypted in a woolen rug by weaving weed into rose, ash into flame?
This lovely handspun contention is no less than an extravagant hint, my judicious darling
Not the kohl dot on your neck, not the hand trained to wave thrice to avert your demons
Not esfand, not turmeric, kept you from being eaten— fate’s maw is malicious, darling
You struck the enemies with shock and awe, smoked them out of their living rooms
They cast the evil eye just before execution when you were least suspicious, darling
You ordered robes of fire-proof textiles, goblets of amethyst, amulets of bloodstone
Your superpower-needs for protection left the planet bankrupt, my ambitious darling
Look, the lovely tropical paisleys, the arctic-blue blossoms on your trousseau rug
No nuptial bliss as exquisite as art— the true magic carpet ride, my capricious darling
Zeest, come, unravel the day to the song of the koel, the magpie, the scent of wild moss
You’ve burnt the sage, sprinkled the salt— let them wish the harm they wish us, darling
This ghazal is an Ekphrastic ghazal, inspired by an image of a hairbrush lying on a Persian rug.