Saturday, June 28, 2025

A Hymn to the Unvanquished


K.  Hassan


                         I

Where catabatic currents scour the lithic spires,

And aeonic shrouds occlude terrestrial choirs,

A palimpsest of flame, of fossilized ache,

In strata inscribed by sovereign quake.

Not evanescent cinders nor ephemeral breath,

But an ontological refusal of death.

The bard emerges from mnemonic shales,

His locution: insurgent, semiotic gales.

                     II


He speaks not in monadic tone,

But as aggregate, as rhizomatic moan.

A collective corpus in discursive rupture,

Haunted by Realpolitik's abject structure.

Each morpheme cleaves the hegemon’s hide,

Where subaltern souls in silence reside.

Diasporic syntax, interred in dust,

Resurges as lament, as covenant, as trust..

                      III

Force projection masked in sovereign grace,

Cartographic violence on every face.

The empires march with legal charade,

Where doctrines of control are deftly laid.

They brandish treaties like sacred text,

But power’s grammar is always annexed.

Yet mythopoeia undoes their claim,

As poiesis rebirths the profaned name.


                  IV

A sonogram of revolt echoes in the dirt,

An acoustic hauntology of ancient hurt.

The poet’s voice, an eschatonic drum,

From which repressed signifiers come.

His verse, an insurgent chronotope,

Contorts the imperial epistemic scope.

Against the logocentric regime of pain,

He sings the old hymns in his tongue again.


                   V


No tender idyll, no lyric repose,

But eros entombed in martial throes.

Two lovers—figures in ontic dismay,

Disjointed by history’s punitive ballet.

Their intimacy: a syntax of dissent,

Foreclosed by biopolitical intent.

Yet through them bleeds a mythic trace,

The homeland’s wound, the lover’s face.


                     VI


The thorn bush grows where bullets rained,

Its dermis coded in the trauma named.

An allegorical flora in semiotic scream,

Rooted in martyrs’ nocturnal dream.

Its barbs: phatic gestures of sacred pain,

A vegetal archive no fire can stain.

It blooms in silence, austere and grim,

A lexicon of the world grown dim.                VII


Love, here, is praxis not affect,

An ontological rupture that empires detect.

It is the scream beneath the juridical code,

An irruptive logos where the repressed explode.

Each kiss a manifesto, each gaze a writ,

Against the dominion of the hypocrite.

Their union: a mnemonic syntax inscribed,

In every refugee who has survived.


                   VIII

He sang not in syllables but in scars,

His song was a siege against the stars.

In necro-political theatre he dwelt,

Where ethics and aesthetics violently melt.

His grammar was forged in detention's womb,

His phonemes wept in a mother’s tomb.

He did not write, he transubstantiated,

Every line a scream transliterated.




                     IX

Linguicide was state’s divine decree,

But he conjured a phonology set free.

From interdicted vowels and silent scripts,

He carved rebellion on bitten lips.

Lexemes of insurgency took root,

Each syntax a dialectical pursuit.

A tree of speech bloomed from the ban,

Its fruit forbidden, yet feeds the clan.


                    X

Cartographies of control unfold,

Through algorithmic warfare cold.

Surveillance wrapped in legalese,

Propaganda sold as civil peace.

Yet in the margins, truth coagulates,

Where every silence reverberates.

From spectral bodies and spectral dreams,

A narrative beyond regimes.

                    XI

Close to Judi mount, where rivers choke,

On bones and soot and hope bespoke,

Two graves whisper in dialect dead,

A lullaby for the unsaid.

The thorn bush there—iconoclast vine,

Is memory’s claw, the people's spine.

It rises not in floral cheer,

But as the archive tyrants fear.

                 XII


Each thorn inscribes a juridical curse,

Each petal mimics a funeral verse.

This flora speaks in morphemes drowned,

By bureaucrats in neutral sound.

Yet still it breathes through spectral lore,

An ontology the state abhors.

In every root, a rebel’s prayer,

In every stem, a claim laid bare.

                 XIII


This land is no cartographic site,

But a semiotic field of ceaseless fight.

Its soil is cipher, its rivers verse,

A syntax that resists the curse.

Not mere geography, but mythos cast,

Through every tomb and bullet’s blast.

Each ruin, a syllogism clear,

Each silence, a grammar of fear.

                    XIV


He was not man, but meta-form,

An archetype in dialectic storm.

An episteme wrapped in flesh and rage,

A prophet unbound by linear age.

His speech was quantum, his thought unpinned,

A fugitive logic that couldn’t be skinned.

Each utterance opened cryptic skies,

Each pause: a scream that never dies.

                  XV

He wrote not stories but the soul,

His verses: wounds that never coal.

In every dirge, in every chant,

A universe begins to pant.

The poet dies, but voice remains,

In spectral loops, in psychic chains.

The wound becomes the sacred text,

And every martyr speaks the next.


               XVI

In every orphan’s guarded eye,

The poet’s ghost refuses to die.

In diaspora’s scattered tongues,

In migrant dreams half-rung,

He breathes through fractured signs,

In dislocated paradigms.

No border halts his sovereign breath,

No doctrine curbs his sacred death.               


               XVII


What is a homeland but unresolved script,


Torn by trauma, by exile whipped?


What is a people but archive repressed,


A grammar of pain once dispossessed?


What is a poem but a clandestine map,


A cipher held in history’s trap?


He wrote these queries with bleeding hand,


And buried them deep within the land.


             XVIII



Not even God could pen his song,


For this was forged where gods go wrong.


It is the surplus of divine decree,


The scream before theology.


A sacred heresy in thorned attire,


A logos wrought in human fire.


His poem: an exile’s solar flare,


Burning empires unaware.


                 XIX


Now every field, every mountain pass,


Speaks in the tongue of shattered glass.


His language migrates, becomes terrain,


A sovereign storm against disdain.


The collective rises, one and none,


Under eclipsed and orphaned sun.


And through them walks the ancient scribe,


Beyond God’s reach, our only tribe.

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