Listen to the world’s best poetry read out loud.

Unterrestrial, ungoogleable, unreachable, 

landlocked city that erupts from the sea 

and disappears in the sky; 

whose birds sing in the dawn to come; 

the walled city without walls, Lahore. 

Behind razor wire, the home town 

next door, the Temple Road address 

to which I cannot ask my way back; 

the city of a thousand names and one: 

it can only be Lahore. 

Men of the hinterland arrived at its gates, 

slow moving men with keen eyes bringing bales 

of cloth, marking the doors to knock on. They knew 

their sums and flourished as seeds do 

when the ground is virgin, waiting to be clothed. 

Then when nations rose like party balloons in the sky 

to be sold by balloon men at streetcorners, they melted 

into trains. Their houses stand, their names 

still on gateposts, they themselves dead. Asked 

for the blood group, I extend a finger called Lahore.