ITS DIFFICULT TO WRITE A POEM Only the one who gave birth to a baby knows it or the one who lost the baby before she could give it birth. The two sorrows are the same. As if you're being branded with red-hot irons, or pierced from head to toe with a fork. Darkness, dead of silence; no door or hole in the wall for the sound to escape. A blunt knife, but in your hands, dully gouging at your own neck. With a masochisfs joy you watch your body writhe in pain. By and by, as the seconds tick, you push one being out of another, out onto the pile of filth, then give that being a name. [Translated from the Urdu by C.M. Nairn] Annual of Urdu Studies, #7 48