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Poem

This was not our destiny, that union with the beloved would take place.
If we had kept on living longer, then would have been kept waiting

If I lived on your promise, then know this that I knew it to be false
For would I not have died of happiness, if I had had trust [in it]?

From your delicacy I knew that the vow had been bound loosely
You could never have broken it, if it had been firm

Let someone ask my heart about your half-drawn arrow
Where would this anxiety/ pain have come from, if it had gone through the liver?

What kind of friendship is this, that friends have become Advisors?
If someone had been a healer, if someone had been a sympathizer!

From the rock-vein would drip that blood which would never have stopped
If this which you are considering ‘grief’ this were just a spark

Although grief is life-threatening, how would we escape, while there is a heart?

If there were not the grief of passion, there would be the grief of livelihood

To whom might I say what it is- the night of sadness is a bad disaster!
Why would I have minded dying, if it took place one time?

Since upon having died, I became disgraced- why were I not drowned in the ocean?
Neither a funeral procession would ever been formed, nor would there anywhere be a tomb

Who can see him? for that Oneness is unique
If there were even a whiff of twoness, then somehow [He] would be two or four

These problems of mysticism! this discourse of yours, Ghalib!
We would consider you a saint- if you weren’t a wine-drinker.

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