When they brought down our ancestral home
in Downtown Srinagar, All was lost except
an old safe, made of the molded memories
and iron and painted light sky blue
Its keys long lost, it lay un-opened
in our garage until the time,
The night refused to leave Wular and
The sun could not
draw the hermit
Dawn out of its solitude.
When the phantom rain rained on that
desolate night, pattering on the tin roof
It fashioned a key out of my ragged soul
On the shelves made of walnut-wood
Hidden under a pile of stock-lies
that I needed to survive, the old box creaked
with sheafs of yellowing paper
And the electric dreams of executioners
Along with wills
that prisoners wrote
With nails on the greying walls of
The palace turned
torture hall
Carefully stuck between moon-blood
Stained velvets, an old
nose ring and
A lifetime of stuffed regrets, secrets
And forgotten loves woven
into a million
Unslept nights, which had melded
Into the blue of night
At the bottom of the safe, an unstrung
Cello lay next to a
bottle of fake chardonnay
with verses inscribed in exquisite Persian
Along with
a misplaced talisman
written in archaic Arabic with hewn rice
which was once mailed to
farway deserts where
God was rumored to live
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