Circular Connections

Today's the final game of the FIFA World Cup, involving Germany and Argentina.

It's a rather obscure fact that the "Brazuca" football used in this year's World Cup is manufactured in Pakistan.[1] The city where this football is manufactured is Sialkot, in northern Punjab.

Sialkot was also the birthplace, in 1877, of one Dr. Muhammad Iqbal. Iqbal was a bit of a modern-day polymath: a poet, philosopher, traveler and -- perhaps unavoidably; given that he was born, lived and died under the British Raj -- a politician and statesman.

Iqbal spent quite a bit of his youth in Europe: England, Germany and Spain. He finished his doctoral thesis in Germany and resided in Munich and Heidelberg, studying Nietzsche and Goethe. Decades later, Heidelberg honored its one-time quiet, luminary citizen by naming a street after him.[2]

Decades later, too, the people of Argentina commemorated their friendship with the people of Pakistan by making a park, Plaza de Pakistan, in their capital city of Beunos Aires.[3] A plaque in the park quotes a Farsi (Persian) couplet from Iqbal:

آدمیت احترام آدم است
برتر از گردوں مقام آدم است

(Humanity is when man the dignity of others defends
And by doing so his stature above the heavens ascends)

I'm happily looking forward to seeing Germany play against Argentina on a football field using a ball made in Sialkot, Pakistan.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adidas_Brazuca
[2] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Iqbal_Street_in_Heidelberg_Germany.jpg
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaza_de_Pakistan

()

The void you left
I've tried to fill in many ways.
Tears sufficed for a while --
Brimmed over the gaping hole, in fact --
But you'd not have liked that.

A freakish workload, I also tried.
It worked: a practical salve
To heal and conceal.
But fatigue is the inevitable result,
And the heart-wounds still remain.

Memories, I have plenty.
With them I've tried to plug the gap.
But here, they work paradoxically:
They enlarge the hole
The more I fill.

I'm learning yet
To cope, to hope, to grieve,
And to learn to live with the void.
Not fill it up like a disused quarry,
But leave it like a serene valley
Where your dancing footfalls once resounded,
And where your footmarks still remain.


For Luke Barrett
July 4, 2014