hun koi mira nahin
“Thousands of my couplets have fallen asleep in graves of paper — what a strange mother I am, none of my children stays alive.”
अजब हूँ कोई मिरा नहीं रहता
The verse in Devanagari — it carries the authenticity of the original, and every Hindi reader can read it.
Here the poet turns the metaphor on himself with startling honesty — his couplets are children, the pages they lie on are graves. The strangeness he confesses is a mother's grief inverted: a maker who outlives everything he makes. It is craft examined without vanity, even with sorrow.
Take an honest measure of what you create — some of it will not last, and naming that loss is part of taking the work seriously.
The heart of this site stays with Iqbal: explore his couplets → Or browse the whole Other Voices shelf →