Empty Handed
Empty Handed - form Summary
Ghazal Frames Fragmented Lament
This poem is a ghazal, a series of autonomous couplets that together create a sustained mood rather than a single narrative. Each couplet registers a moment of loss, humiliation, longing, or self-aware madness, using striking images—crowns and lament, mirrors and wandering eyes, tears as ruby fragments—to evoke transience and erotic pain. The ghazal form permits abrupt shifts in perspective while reinforcing themes of helplessness and impermanence. Mir's biography of personal suffering and political upheaval informs the poem’s elegiac tone, making each couplet both personal lament and universal reflection.
Read Complete AnalysesThe head that's held high today because it wears a crown, tomorrow, here itself, will in lamentation drown. Your face puts the beauty of the angels all to shame, to your graceful gait compared, appears the partridge lame. From worlds of these horizons who did ever safe depart? Way - laid and empty handed each traveller did part. Even while imprisoned, did my craziness endure, seems now for my insanity, stoning is the cure. My heart's each wound, on judgement day, to God submits a plea, seeking justice, recompense against your cruelty. Whoever did enchant my eye there only did I stare, whereas the mirror's eye is prone to darting here and there. With head tucked under arm, a hundred springs I stayed to power of my winglessness I never have assayed. To my eyelashes such a gleam, you say, it does impart my tear drop is a fragment of my ruby coloured heart. Yesterday to view the ocean too I had gone near it, longingly, eyeing my teary lashes did appear. Breathe here softly as with fragility here all is fraught, in this workshop of the word where wares of glass are wrought. After Miir of burning heart, you should quickly enquire for who can say how long the morning lamp will be afire?
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