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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Agha Shahid Ali
Agha Shahid Ali
Agha Shahid Ali was born in New Delhi on February 4, 1949. He grew up Muslim in Kashmir, and was later educated at the University of Kashmir, Srinagar, and University...
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FURTHER READING
Poems About Weather
A Crosstown Breeze
by Henry Taylor
A Line-storm Song
by Robert Frost
A Winter Without Snow
by J. D. McClatchy
An Octave Above Thunder
by Carol Muske-Dukes
Aubade: Some Peaches, After Storm
by Carl Phillips
Flood
by Eliza Griswold
Flood
by Miyazawa Kenji
From "Snow-Bound," 11:1-40, 116-154
by John Greenleaf Whittier
Great Sleeps I Have Known
by Robin Becker
In April
by James Hearst
It Was Raining In Delft
by Peter Gizzi
Now Winter Nights Enlarge
by Thomas Campion
Ode to the West Wind
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Problems with Hurricanes
by Victor Hernández Cruz
Rain
by Claribel Alegría
Sitting Outside
by W. D. Snodgrass
Sleet
by Alan Shapiro
Snow
by Naomi Shihab Nye
The Snow Storm
by Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Storm
by Theodore Roethke
Who Has Seen the Wind?
by Christina Rossetti
Related Prose
Poetic Form: Ghazal
Other Ghazals
Ghazal of the Better-Unbegun
by Heather McHugh
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Even the Rain  
by Agha Shahid Ali

What will suffice for a true-love knot? Even the rain?

But he has bought grief's lottery, bought even the rain.

"our glosses / wanting in this world" "Can you remember?"
Anyone! "when we thought / the poets taught" even the rain?

After we died--That was it!--God left us in the dark.
And as we forgot the dark, we forgot even the rain.

Drought was over. Where was I? Drinks were on the house.
For mixers, my love, you'd poured--what?--even the rain.

Of this pear-shaped orange's perfumed twist, I will say:
Extract Vermouth from the bergamot, even the rain.

How did the Enemy love you--with earth? air? and fire?
He held just one thing back till he got even: the rain.

This is God's site for a new house of executions?
You swear by the Bible, Despot, even the rain?

After the bones--those flowers--this was found in the urn:
The lost river, ashes from the ghat, even the rain.

What was I to prophesy if not the end of the world?
A salt pillar for the lonely lot, even the rain.

How the air raged, desperate, streaming the earth with flames--
to help burn down my house, Fire sought even the rain.

He would raze the mountains, he would level the waves,
he would, to smooth his epic plot, even the rain.

New York belongs at daybreak to only me, just me--
to make this claim Memory's brought even the rain.

They've found the knife that killed you, but whose prints are these?
No one has such small hands, Shahid, not even the rain.



From Call Me Ishmael Tonight by Agha Shahid Ali. Copyright © 2003 by the Agha Shahid Ali Literary Trust. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
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