Poem by Dr. Jawaz Jaffri

Tree Was My First Love

In the early days of my existence
I had more enemies
than hair on my body
Tree was my first love
It’s roots
are bottomed deep
in the soil of my being

In the suburbs of my blood
resides those times
when I inscribed the first verse of my hunger on the lushy body of a woman
and on the bark of the shadiest tree in the forest
It started to spread over my body
like a sky
I thus forgot the art of uplifting the wall
by wearing the crawling slumber from its bark
I dreamed of felicitous bodies filled with smells of earliest flavours arousing from yeilding trees

Tree was my friend
he sent me a gift
of its soonest bough through air
I invented a flute
from half of the bough
and scattered my loneliness in all corners of the universe
And I started moving away my enemies
from the remaining bough

From its branch I broke
my initial pottery and weapons
and came down from it
with a desire to inhabit a city
I invented an axe
the moment I put my feet on Earth
and started digging roots of the tree

I learned the tact of lighting fire from stones
and dispatched a handful of ash
on the dazzling face of the tree

Translated by Daneshwar Khaled