Too powerful, in the eyes of some officials, as Faraz knows all too well. In the '80s, he angered dictator Gen. Zia ul-Haq with his poem "The Siege," which excoriated the army. For such heresies against the military establishment, Faraz was arrested and thrown in jail.
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Over the last year, poetry has, in many ways, emerged again as the galvanizing language of political protest in Pakistan.
After President Pervez Musharraf suspended the country's chief justice in March 2007, lawyers including Ahsan mounted protests that also attracted human rights activists. Clad in their trademark black suits, the attorneys braved tear gas and riot police and have remained at the forefront of opposition up to the present. They roundly condemned the six-week state of emergency Musharraf declared in November, which resulted in the chief justice's dismissal and Ahsan's arrest.
At every demonstration, their rallying cry draws on a famous Urdu verse by legendary poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz:
We shall see
Certainly we, too, shall see
That day which was promised,
Which was written in God's ink
We shall see
"A lot of people told me that Faiz has come alive after the emergency yet again. They tell me, 'We've come back to Faiz when we're at a loss for words,' " said the late poet's daughter, Salima Hashmi, an eminent painter and dean of visual arts at Beaconhouse National University in Lahore.
Her father was a left-wing intellectual whom the government imprisoned in the 1950s for his alleged involvement in a coup attempt. The state does not accord any official recognition to his work, but because of his stature in Pakistani letters, most people are familiar with it anyway, which can lead to surprising results.
"Sometimes I find a totally right-wing mullah standing up in front of a huge audience and starting with two lines of my father's poetry," Hashmi said. "I have a good laugh, and think he would have had a good laugh also."
Other exponents of "resistance poetry" include such luminaries as Habib Jalib, who spent time behind bars in the 1960s and '70s for lambasting the government in his lyrics, one of which famously compared a manipulated new constitution to "a morning without light." In the recent protests against Musharraf, Jalib's poetry has also been widely invoked: "Such customs . . . / I do not accept, I refuse to recognize."
