Arabs, who founded the excellence of rhyme <br />On heaven or earth who were second to none <br />The world recognized their eloquence sublime <br />But our honoured folk have their traces erased <br />Having first lost their art and second their glory <br />Then drowned poetry thus ending the story. <br /> <br />To letters they gave life, they adorned their fiction <br />With rhetoric they polished the text of religion <br />Like the tip of the sword they used their diction <br />The jab of their tongue was sharp as the dagger <br />Morality was furbished by their prose and poetry <br />The world was stirred by the flow of their oratory. <br /> <br />Their offspring here who have magic of words <br />Whose style is admired by aged and young <br />In rhetoric who are known all over the world <br />But their true worth is nothing more than this: <br />In poetry their lives when they frittered away <br />Then clowns in carnivals their poems do bray. <br /> <br />Nautch girls recite all their poems by heart <br />Bards and troubadours owe them much gratitude <br />In brothels, bordellos, their desires do start <br />Satan sings panegyrics, praises them no end <br />Having drawn thick veils over our minds entire <br />They have taken away our right thinking power.<br /><br />Maulana Altaf Hussain Hali<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/impact-of-arabic-poetry/
