And what better way to ward off work’s haunting rigor
Than to intoxicate myself
with music I cannot fully recount
Sung to words in a language I do not speak

Verses that wash ashore
Like waves of foreign lands do, in a million tongues
And yet, so
Gurgling with words familiar, sounds akin
And the echoes of a thousand generations past.

How many tongues have thy hardy notes sung
Rippling over your stony syllables,
Their cragged crevasses -
fipples to a whistling breath -
Shaped by the grandchild, smoothened by her own thence
and so descending,
as did the peoples from mountain to plain,
Onto the polished pebbles that find script today.

And how many fine hill-dwelling hearts
Have thy passions borne,
Slurred, whispered, shouted true
Liberated, unwritten, into time forlorn.
Some crooned
    of goblets and gulaab,
And others sang -
    of saans and sharaab
And some reminisce
Of chestnut brown and strands of the sun.

“Bedeh bedeh”, she says,
“so I may lose myself” -
To music our memories recount
Sung to words
in a language they speak.