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Surviving Kashmir

In Kashmir
Tragedy doesn't strike you, 
It seeps inside you, like a malignant disease 
Slowly making its way to your brain,  
Disintegrating your mental faculties,  one by one. 
Taking you apart one minute at a time,  making happiness 
A sepia picture that grandfather 
Put up on the wall of the ancestral house,  
That is now just a road,  with every passing car
Raising dust over your family tree,  the room where 
You once crawled,  teeming with unruly pedestrians,  
Grounding your memories to mere dust,  walking by 
an invisible house with blue windows and tin sheeted gate.
In Kashmir, 
tragedy doesn't seek you, 
it survives you.
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Aditya said…
This poem, to me sounded like a voice from the very air around the tense bayonets and the walnut trees the first time i read it... And every time that I have read it ever since. Wonderful work Tasim.
March 2, 2016 at 11:27 AM
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