I Am A River, Come Drift With Me

O shorelines! What are you looking at, just standing there Come drift with me The stillness of the centuries flows with me You come along too my companions, from the day I was born You are the twins that never embrace each other You think I am the reason for that! How wrong you are O you, gazing each other from afar! It is just me who unites the travelers coming to your door from the far off lands and lets the boats wade across How brutally they tear apart my bust Come, rub your murky, sandy torsos against my waves Get to know the times full of pleasure from my dampness and softness My caress is the same for all those who touch me I do not make any distinction between left and right Come drift with me! I pass through the cities and the countries The borders do not block my passage From my waters, the great love stories come into being So many bridges are hanging over me So many faiths take a dip into me The civilizations commit suicide, when I am dead I am the keeper of the geography and an eye witness to the history I keep on flowing full of books turned to ashes, dead bodies torn apart and all the grime of the settlements When I get filled up to the brinks I start oozing out of the eyes of the poets and their poems I am a living fossil I am the Sindhu, I am the Danube But when I get transformed into the Tigris and the Euphrates I become an infinite metaphor of the thirst I don't have a single name I am a watery traveler of the time and travel across the rocky terrains under different names For me, to halt is to die I cannot be preserved in any museum and can't be embodied in some memento The echoes of the sorrows hidden in my riverbed are heard in the silent trails like the wafts and the hums of my songs resonate in the arched labyrinths of the ancient sacred places and the hearts of dervishes clad in Pashmina and the dwellers of the seminaries O my eternal guardians! Be at ease drifting with me I fear no threat from anyone except, the torrential rains that fill me up with rage sometimes and I get out of your protective bounds to get to the dwellings, to the fields, to the meadows and to the low-lying plains and inundate them along with you But, with the resurgence of the sunlight I get back to my path and you take me back into your protective custody O legendary valiants! I do not doubt your loyalty You fall into me, even if you are cut into pieces through erosion O fellow drifters! Passing through the tall green mountains, the old wrinkled plateaus, the thick forests, the plains, and the sandy deserts I always fall into the salty ocean where the saline winds welcome me with open arms and the sweetness of my waters gets transformed into a lathery bitterness And the two of you, the ever separated, the eternally parted let me embrace the ocean and stand erect in a perpetual farewell posture But I can see now time after time, year after year my water level is receding and my glucose level is getting to a dangerous low Flowing ceaselessly, my flow has started gasping and I've started getting parched before even I get to the ocean and yet at some places the global warming has forced me to go underground and even you two immersed deep into the thoughts of the sailors, the fishermen and the fish are drifting away from me day by day O dwellers of the waters! My path is strange Always downwards from the above Wish I could get to the sky someday I would have become a rainbow passing through the clouds and you would have gotten drenched in the colors along with me Beyond the clouds, much beyond after passing through the azure voids up there we could have reached a world free of this pollution, this suffocation, this fishnet of human desires Where we could breathe freely Where I would have kept on running without any hindrances and would have kept on flowing like omnipresent time! Original poem in Urdu by Naseer Ahmed Nasir English translation by Kamran Awan