Search results | The Beloved Witness

Title: Dacca gauzes [poem] (1983 draft, "Reading Dorian Gray in Kashmir")
Author: Agha, Shahid Ali, 1949-2001
Date: 1983, 2013-12-01
Type of item: poetry, manuscript – poem
Categories: ancestors, textiles, colonialism, family
Full Text: Reading Dorian Gray in Kashmir . . . for a whole year, he sought to accumulate the most exquisite specimens . . . of textile and embroidered work . . . the Dacca gauzes, that from their transparency, are known in the East . . . --The Picture 2; Dorian Gray Dorian Gray wore those gauzes from Dacca known as woven air, running water, evening dew, that transparent cotton a dead art now, dead for over a hundred years. No one can imagine, my grandmother says, what it was to wear, just to touch, tha...
PID: HamiltonShahid:27

Title: Houses [poem]
Author: Agha, Shahid Ali, 1949-2001
Date: 1985-05-08
Type of item: poetry, manuscript – poem, Lyric poetry
Categories: exile, family, troubles in Kashmir
Full Text: HOUSES for Jon Anderson The man who buries his house in the sand and digs it up again, each evening, learns to put it together quickly and just as quickly to take it apart. My parents sleep like children in the dark. I am too far to hear them breathe but I remember their house is safe and I can sleep, the night's hair black and thick in my hands. My parents sleep in the dark. When the moon rises, the night's hair turns white in my arms. I am thirteen thousand miles from home. I comb...
PID: HamiltonShahid:22

Title: Dacca gauzes [poem] (undated draft, "Reading Dorian Gray in Kashmir")
Author: Agha, Shahid Ali, 1949-2001
Type of item: poetry, manuscript – poem, Lyric poetry
Categories: ancestors, textiles, colonialism, family
Full Text: The Decca Gauzes . . . for a whole year he sought to accumulate the most exquisite 0 0 0 m.CCa. 8311265, 0 o 0 —-The Picture gg Dorian Gray Not only Dorian Gray but many aristocrats of Europe wore those transparent Dacca gauzes known as woven air, running water, evening dew. A dead art now, dead over a hundred years. "No one can imagine," my grandmother says, "what it was to wear or touch that cloth." She wore it once, an heirloom sari from her mother's dowry, proved ...
PID: HamiltonShahid:35

Title: Postcard from Kashmir [poem]
Author: Agha, Shahid Ali, 1949-2001
Date: 1979-10
Type of item: poetry, manuscript – poem, Lyric poetry
Categories: exile, letters
Full Text: Postcard from Kashmir "Kashmir shrinks into your mailbox, your home a neat four by six inches. You alwfys loved neatness, so a e inch i.‘h—aut-gundhod th my . (WK 30-9-n ' acme, a disénce is the closest you'll ever get. ‘when you retu.rn,.pof" ' u~JVV\ 1 the colours 119-91.’ 4% so brilliant, the-can-out-sonar a.a_i.‘La.'nt-'h'vleo the river never so clean, so Rﬁbultramarine. Things here are as usual, though we always talk of you; nﬂzpu. The snow isn&apo...
PID: HamiltonShahid:21

Title: Ghazal [poem]
Author: Agha, Shahid Ali, 1949-2001
Date: 2012-07-10
Type of item: poetry, manuscript – poem, Ghazals
Categories: textiles, religion
Full Text: GHAZAL Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar -—Laurence Hope Where are you now? Who lies beneath your spell tonight before you agonize him in farewell tonight? Pale hands that once loved me beside the Shalimarz Whom else from rapture's road will you expel tonight? Those "Fabrics of Cashmere--" "to make Me beautiful--" "Trinket"-—to gem-—"Me to adorn--How-—tell"-—tonight? I beg for haven: Prisons, let open your gates-— A refugee from pity seeks a c...
PID: HamiltonShahid:31