The Ghazal
It seems to me that a fire, when lit
Is very much like our minds, when lit
The very best sorts of rooms in a house
Are the easiest to find, when lit
My enthusiasm for your cooking
Burns like a match in time, when lit
If you’d ever met my mother, you’d see
Her face glowed with joy- it shined when lit
I can’t say I know all about the light
But I know that their work I’ve signed, when lit.
I really enjoy working with this form. It’s difficult, and I couldn’t manage to make all of my lines have the same number of syllables (though I generally got pretty close). There’s a sort of joy that one can derive by the evolution of the qafia and radif. Here, I’m working with one of my favorite concepts- light. The multiple meanings of “lit” fit well into the the idea of a ghazal- in one couplet it can literally mean having light on a thing, while later it can relate to how a face can light up, or how a match can be lit. In the final couplet, I refer to my own relationship with light- as a light designer for theater, I know that my contribution to a work of theater (my signature) is the light on the faces of actors. I determine how they’re seen by how I put light on them. In this attempt at a ghazal, light shifts between an active force and a passive force, a metaphor and a reality. It’s interesting to note how the radif informs the qafia- the meaning of the qafia is determined by the repeated radif. Whereas it could always take a different meaning (and indeed the couplet could usually be interpreted to mean many other unrelated things without the radif), the particular version of the qafia that we are exploring is explained by the radif that follows.