Imtiaz Dharker is a poet, artist, and filmmaker born in Pakistan whose work often touches on issues of cultural displacement and the search for the feeling of home. Her poem "Blessing," first published in the 1994 collection Postcards from god, expresses the way that water becomes a blessing in a place that suffers from drought.
In the poem, the speaker describes what times of drought look and feel like. Concentrating on a particular urban environment, the speaker then chronicles the fortunate occurrence of a burst municipal pipe. Everyone in the surrounding community gathers to collect and enjoy the water. Water takes on active qualities as it sings over the bones of playing children.
Postcards from god was well-received. Professor James Procter states that this collection is about what Dharker calls "her ‘real country’: ‘movement, transition, crossing over’, as well as the tensions between secular and religious cultures in a world of fear and emergent fundamentalisms." In 1997, Bloodaxe Books republished Postcards from god to include poems from Dharker's other collection Purdah.
