To step into Naheed Qamar’s poetry is to step onto a landscape on which the smell of moth orchids in the wind becomes the very air of settled hurt. This is not just a jumble of words; it is the pounding of existence’s broken, scattered pieces, ringing through centuries of quiet to drive a beam of light into the darkness of the soul. Her poems are a mirror in which the scars of time, the valleys of loneliness, and the ashes of love look for their own reflection.

The deluge of human experience, which passes through the framework of her work, is actually the deluge flowing into “the aqueduct of time” (زمانے کی کاریز) to find its way towards the heart of the narrative. Every word weighs upon the heart like a stone – phrases like “the moon growing on the chest of the heart” (دل کے سینے پر اگتے چاند) not only attain un-questionable heights of imagery but cover the pain of being as if a blazing star had come to rest upon the palm. It is from here that the question arises, pulsing at the heart of each poem: “What is that which we seek in the heart of the story?” (وہ کیا ہے جسے ہم کہانی کے دل میں ڈھونڈتے ہیں؟). For Naheed, this quest is not wordplay; it is the magic of wound upon wound, where “the flow of blood” (لہو کی روانی) is the only reality.

Time, in her poetry, is a hurt traveler, “lost in the corridor of time” (وقت کی راہداری میں بھٹکا ہوا), standing on the ruins of itself. “Leaf by leaf, scattering days” (پتی پتی بکھرتے دن) and “wooden staircases of memory” (یاد کے چوبی زینے) are not just symbols, but fragments of earth from the tearing apart of existence. When she says: “What did we live for, even if we lived — without sky, without earth” (ہم جیے بھی تو کیا — بے فلک، بے زمیں), it is not a complaint, but an expression of that human condition where the price of being “laborers of love’s dreams” (خواب محبت کے مزدور) is always paid through the hands of indifference.

Aesthetic bittersweetness lies in Naheed Qamar’s words. Images like “the moon on the branch of sight” (شاخ نظر پر چاند) and metaphors like “grief’s ice-bound cage” (غم کے یخ بستہ پنجرے) make her poetry visual sculptures. But this beauty is never bereft of suffering. The agony concealed in each stunning word is such a “whirlpool of the separation” (برہا کی منجدھار) which “resonates within the jugular vein” (شہ رگ کے بھیتر گونجتی). Her manner is so silken that even the hilt of the sword yields to silk’s pliability – “The scale-pan itself measuring union, separation’s sting itself” (خود ماشہ تولہ وصل کا، فرقت کی ٹیس بھی آپ).

In poetry, Naheed’s poems are a fire dancing on its own ashes. Descriptions such as “glistening from the ash of love” (عشق کی راکھ سے دمک) and “kohl of pain” (درد کے سرمے) do not just make her poetry a verbal wonder, but display an energetic philosophy of living in which “the heart’s paralysis” (دل کا سکتہ) is actually life’s biggest reality. When she writes, “At seeing you, heart, wind, time, world, all stood still” (تجھے دیکھ کر دل، ہوا، وقت، دنیا جہاں تھم گئے تھے), it is not only a romantic situation, but that cosmic silence where existence breathes in for eternal breath.

There is no line drawn between death and life in Naheed Qamar’s work. “The hour of resurrection” (حشر کی گھڑی) and “the sun falling into the netherworld” (پاتال میں گرتا سورج) are two faces of the same coin. That is why, while reading her poetry, the reader sees herself/ himself in a “twilight” (دھندلکے) where “weakness of vision” (ضعف بصارت) also becomes a symbol for the opening of the inner eyes. Slipping into the abyss of her words, one is left with the sensation that one is “the heart itself, trembling upon its own ruins” (خود اپنے ملبے پہ سہما ہوا دل).

As drips from a wounded crane, the remaining bead of a dried tear, or the forgotten echo of an incomplete cry, these poems hold in them the quintessence of pain and silence instead of words. The sun passeth over them, but they are the bony remains of hopes interred in the slaughter fields of dreams, gathered by the frosty sighs of night and left at the doorstep of dawn. These are scream poems, silent screams that are etched into the decayed walls of lost cities—screams that howl with every breeze—pleading hands, moaning lost voices. They are a pain too deep to be spoken, but too agitated to remain still, and were conceived out of stifled howls that were never fully voiced—or perhaps never truly heard.

The last thing to note is this: Naheed Qamar’s poetry is not observation; it is the tear of a century, penned with “ink burning on tiny hands” (ننھے ہاتھوں پہ جلتی ہوئی روشنائی). It is the account of that “fruitless toil” (بے سود مشقت) which speaks of each faceless spirit homeless “in your earth and sky” (تیرے ارض و سما میں). Maybe this is the reason that her poetry rents a chasm within the soul while being read – as if an injured silence (گھائل چپ) had all at once become audible. And this rift is, in fact, the path of that light passing through the air perfumed with the aroma of moth orchids to reach the remotest recesses of our soul.