Alamgir Hashmi has been writing poetry for the last forty years. He won the poetry prize in the All-Pakistan 
  Creative Writing Contest in 1972 and the Patras Bokhari Award (National Literature Prize) of the Pakistan 
  Academy of Letters in 1985, and was the first English-language writer to bring such recognition to English 
  writing in Pakistan. He is also widely published abroad — in the UK,  Australia, India, Canada, New Zealand 
  and the United States.  Equally well-known as author of several scholarly books, he has been Professor 
  of English and Comparative Literature in Pakistan, Europe and the United States. He was a judge of the 
  Commonwealth Writers Prize 1990, and a member of the 1996 jury for the Neustadt International Prize 
  for Literature. His latest book The Ramazan Libation  was published by ARC in 2004. 


Arrival
 
It’s hanging gardens from the town below.
Up there, a good jeep drive
as I speak with a friend:
the travois and dogs I had in the North
have life insurance now in museums,
and I don’t.
Richard Wright hasn’t been here?
Blackboy stands his ground
even this other side of the mound
next to his favourite bush;
a middling tree that is
free of leaf, branch, even roots
it seems—lives on air and light.
From something taller and rough yonder,
a kookaburra shouts what might
be a laugh,
chopping the park
and its livelong day into a half.
 
Our y-turn leads to Perth,
bathing in the last sun.
She tells the Swan
to flow on for another sixty miles
(or perhaps minutes)
before the ocean reclaims the earth.