Just as the FIFA World Cup 2014 was going on, there was another world cup happening in the world of literature -- the Poetry World Cup.

Unlike football where the Pakistan team was not in the contest, it did quite well rather won laurels in the poetry world, as the country’s entry, a poem written by Mehvash Amin reached its final and was the runner-up. The contest was held by The Missing Slate, a literary journal launched years back, and received 32 entries from across the world. The contest was divided into two rounds, followed by quarter finals, semi-finals and then the final. It had received poems from countries including Venezuela, Ghana, Russia, Scotland, Nigeria, Bermuda, England, China, Cyprus, the US, the Caribbean and Pakistan.

The winners of various rounds were decided by online polling where readers voted the best poems with the winning poem getting the most votes. Mehvash Amin’s poem “Karachi” reached the final after winning all the rounds.

Talking about her entry, Amin, who is the editor of Hello Pakistan, says, “I had sent my poem to be published in the Missing Slate. The editor asked me whether I wanted to enter the contest they were organising. They included my poem in the contest after that.”

She says she has been writing poetry for quite a long time and plans to publish her poetry collection in the near future.

In the final, Amin lost to Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé of Singapore whose prose poem, titled “Impulsive and Impetuous”, received just 25 more votes than Amin’s “Karachi”, which was in a winning position until the last few hours of voting.

“In Pakistan, very few people read English poetry while everyone is into reading fiction,” Amin says, hinting at one of the factors behind her loss in the final. She says newspapers, the media and social media of Singapore backed their poet during the voting process, which resulted in its victory.

After the final, former federal information minister and ambassador to the US, Sherry Rehman, tweeted, “We did not do enough to support u, I agree, unlike the Singaporeans, whose media backed. Don’t lose heart.”

Amin’s poem’s central theme is based on the situation in Karachi, erstwhile City of Lights. It is a requiem to the city plagued by fear, terrorism and lawlessness where nobody feels safe. It shows the artistic sensibility of the poet who has a deep insight into the affairs of the city beset by bloodshed and target killings.

Following is the poem “Karachi” by Mehvash Amin that made the country proud in the Poetry World Cup.

“We must learn to quarter fear, / dice it, serve it on plates / in manageable portions. / Instead, it is etched like / a hologram against the sky, / starting out of the sockets / of buses burnt on the road, / where they root / like indestructible fungi. / The rat-a-tat of gunfire/ shatters the silence into pieces / of a stone requiem. / Come now, instead of / allegorising fear,/ dare we spell it out?/ Dare we name the man / who left his house / never thinking: tonight it’s I, / till the bullets made him / spin and dance? And dare we / name the woman / who will not know / the mess haemorrhaging / into the sewer as her husband?/ A yellow moon comes up / and the smell of fish / from the phosphorescent sea / almost cancels out / the smell of fear / and singed hopes. / Almost. For nothing can atone / but the seamless reparation / of fairy tale endings.”

Published in Dawn, July 27th, 2014