Hamna Riaz

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Hey everyone! Since I am a poetry fan, I'll be posting some of my favorite poems here for all of you to enjoy as well.

If We Must Die

If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
--Claude McKay (1919)

Eros
I call for love
But help me, who arrives?
This thug with broken nose
And squinty eyes.
'Eros, my bully boy,
Can this be you,
With boxer lips
And patchy wings askew?'

'Madam,' cries Eros,
'Know the brute you see
is what long overuse
Has made of me.
My face that so offends you
Is the sum
Of blows your lust delivered
One by one.

We slaves who are immortal
Gloss your fate
And are the archtypes
That you create.
Better my battered visage,
Bruised but hot,
Than love dissolved in loss
Or left to rot
--Anne Stevenson (1990)

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© Hamna Riaz, 2009