Makhdoom Mohiuddin (1908-69)   was a prominent  Urdu poet; he got several awards including Sahitya Akedemy in 1969.

 Prison

Within its four walls, time has come
to a stop. Its only logic is tyranny,
unmitigated, relentless.

The night is fallen—silence and loneliness
gnaw into my soul. Far, far away from the city’s
deep bosom rises the clangour of chimes,
and I’m startled.
My being flares up, kindling
the tapers of my imagination till the spool
of all my yesterdays lies bare, uncoiled.

These clusters of humans on the highways,
down the streets and narrow lanes—
their hustled footfalls.
On their foreheads the indelible imprints
of angst; from the hollow sockets of their
eyes the blank stare of all the sorrows of yester-
years, the dark forebodings of toinmorrow.

Hundreds of thousands of such fugitives
from life move about listlessly, anguished by
the remorseless brute power of kings and demagogues.

Who knows at what crossroad, this human fodder
may burst into balefire, ignited by centuries
of deprivation of youth sunk in sleep,
chained and bonded.
Only when the fetters clang on tossing in bed
does the din of life break into my being.

Oh, a thousand pities that! have
squandered away the treasure of my life
within these walls, not demolishing
the other prison, offering myself
at the altar of my country’s freedom.

Translated from Urdu: Shiv K Kunzar

Darkness

In the night’s hands a beggar’s bowl,
These flaming stars, this throbbing moon—
these destitutes of the earth whose deprivation
is their resplendent vesture,
also their shroud.
Ensconced in this darkness, their famished
bodies break into wails—
their bodies, the devil’s easy sport.

These wounds of civilization
deep trenches
spiked fences
in whose tangled cobwebs dangle human corpses
on which perch shaggy vultures.
These sundered heads, hands and feet.

And there across these mounds of putrient flesh
howls glacé wind.
Is it some piercing lament,
wail or supplication?

In the womb of night’s silence, is it
the sobbing of some mothers and children,
doomed? Or is it the plaintive cry of the pallid
moon, the stars?

I see on the night’s forehead a cluster
of jaded stars poised in aching eagerness
for the sun to blaze forth.

Gloom—night’s only largesse to man—
what else can it offer?

Translated from Urdu: Shiv K Kumar