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Assignment 5 Beginning Poetry

Due By: Tuesday, March 28
3/21/2006

Week 5 Exercise

Agha Shahid Ali died of Brain Cancer in 2001 (he was 52). As a memorial, his friend Christopher Merrill began a ghazal that could theoretically go on forever. Here is the opening couplet, taken from a ghazal by Agha Shahid Ali:

There’s no sugar in the Promised Land.
Swear by the olive in the God-kissed land.

Here are some of the couplets contributed by other authors.

You abandoned so much Sand to study Stone.
Death is no Dislodging of this: inmost land. (Christina Davis)

Your old kitchen, dear, on Bleecker: sugar dates, black tea.
Yours, then ours. anyone’s now. Memory’s a furious land. (Mark Doty)

We who love water find it again. We learn
to move through the water, to drink, to resist land. (Annie Finch)

Try writing your own couplet (or couplets) to this ghazal.

If you feel very ambitious, try writing your own ghazal.

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