98
teri wafa se kya ho talafi ke dahr meiN
tere siwaa bhi ham pey bahut se sitam huwe
likhtey rahe junuN ki Hikayat e khuun chakaN
har chand is meiN haath hamare qalam huwe
even if you wert faithful, it would not be an enough consolation
as i have suffered many more agonies apart from you
we kept writing chronicles of madness, dripping blood
until our very hands were hacked
classic lines by ghalib: qalam means a pen, and qalam also means to severe or hack: "i kept writing until my hands became pens (after mentioning the dripping blood in the first line)" or "i kept writing until my hands were written off." (for a modern idiom…)
