This Article is a continuation to my previous article which you can read here 👇🏻
https://app.warera.io/article/6a6f297c98df01471fc3a7b2
By your War Correspondent, Still Broke
Every sermon deserves a rebuttal, and Iqbal knew it — which is why Khidr-e-Rah's grim warning was never allowed the last word. It got an answer: Jawab-e-Khizr. Thunder replying to thunder. So, in the spirit of intellectual fairness (and because a second act earns a second round of coins), I offer it here:
[FOLLOWING ARE 4/8 STANZAS]
What is it to make you wonder, if I roam the desert waste?
Witness of enduring life is this unending toil and haste!
You, shut in by walls, have never known that moment when shrill
Bugle‐call that sounds the march goes echoing over wood and hill,
Never known the wild deer’s careless walk across its sandy plain,
Never halt unroofed, uncumbered, on the trail no milestones chain,
Never fleeting vision of that star that crowns the daybreak hour,
Never Gabriel’s radiant brow effulgent from heaven’s topmost tower,
Nor the going‐down of suns in stillness of desert ways,
Twilight splendour such as brightened Abraham
’s world‐beholding gaze,
Nor those springs of running water where the caravans take rest
As in heaven bright spirits cluster round the Fountain of the Blest!
Wildernesses ever now love’s fever seeks and thirsts to roams—
You the furrowed field and palm‐groves fetter to one poor home;
Mellow grows the wine of life when hand to hand the cup goes round
Foolish one! In this alone is life’s eternal secret found.
Life is higher than the calculation of profit and loss;
Life is sometimes living and sometimes forfeiting living.
Do not measure it by the scale of today and tomorrow;
Life is eternal, constantly moving, at every moment youthful.
If you are among the living, fashion your own world;
Life is the secret of Adam, the essence of the words Be and it was!
Ask the reality of life form the heart of the mountain‐digger;
Life is the milky stream, the axe and the hard stone.
In servitude the stream diminishes and almost runs dry,
And in freedom life is an ocean which knows no bounds.
It knows well its power of domination,
Although life is hidden in a frame of clay.
From the sea of existence you arose like a bubble;
In this dwelling of loss, life your test.
While you are still immature, you are a heap of dust;
When you ripen, you will become an irresistible sword.
Where Khidr saw only the exploiter's shadow, this is the reply that promises dawn anyway — the caravan finds its road, the old guard loses its grip, the young inherit the world regardless. It is, frankly, the better sales pitch. Despair earns pity; hope earns applause. And applause, I am learning, tips considerably better.
So consider this the sequel nobody asked for: same beggar, same bowl, marginally more optimistic material. If you like this series make sure to subscribe and tip.
[To be continued, as funds and philosophy allow.]