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Anonymous Mounds of Earth

When the fearless sun finally rose,
The children had started playing
Hide and seek among the graves of
The nameless dead,
Pretend guns blazing above
Bullet-ridden castrated dead lying below
Their fingernails peeled off, Thumbs chopped
liked shawl-weavers burdened with taxes

You could tell in the mellow morning,
Where the dead lay,
Their Clotted blood had mixed into the clay
Their graves marked by blood red irises in
A sea of whites, their lives turned into
Weeds that lay unattended among little
Tin boards proclaiming random numbers assigned
By the lonely grave digger who never knew them

In between widows crying over the wrong graves
And mothers hugging the anonymouss mounds of earth,
The mountains echo with the sacrilegious mirth of
Children playing hide and seek among the nameless
Dead, tempting fate, biding time till they grow-up
And disappear like, others before, among the
nameless dead







(For Showkat Nanda)


* More than 2,000 corpses, believed to be victims of Kashmir's long-running conflict, have been found buried in dozens of unmarked graves. 

   


Comments

Unknown said…
Wallah, Aga Shahid Ali would be so proud of you (and may be a bit scared)
February 17, 2017 at 8:04 PM
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