Skip to main content

Letter to a dead poet

I wish you were here Shahid. My hands fail me again tonight. As the night gnaws at my heart and everything becomes dark. I try to remember your lines again.

But my memory betrays me again. I can't remember anything.

I am not dead, Shahid. I am sure of that because even death cannot be so depressing. I am sure I am in a prison cell because the walls feel cold like stone. Stones, which are as cold as the hands of death.

It's been years since I have seen light come through that window on my windowsill. It has been dark since years now. I have lost count of the years. Perhaps it has not been years but perhaps the days have been too dismal.

It is hard to think coherently these days.

Shahid.

I sometimes have hallucinations. I see men walking with their heads on a pike. I see men with hollow eyes and empty smiles.

The men seem familiar, they all look like me

Shahid, I am scared

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

In Barely Discernible Darkness

I will trace the Jhelum Across Your back with my fingers In barely discernible darkness It will form a paisley Drawn from the memory of An imagined Kashmir No language spoken by Man or Gods shall be Uttered that night Words will be melded, Sentences molded to form A new language of love The ink, a fine powdered Amethyst, shall dry as We write its grammar The quill tips, fashioned From old bones, shall Burn in its blaze The room will be Full of scorch marks In barely discernible darkness -- Tz

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.

Indigo Halls of Imagined Gods

In the indigo halls of Imagined Gods of Love, Lovers leave half burnt letters of incense and trails of broken hearts - Among ruins of shattered Love knots, she sits alone Weaving a rosary out of Thin air With longing as its thread and Beads made out of tears -- In the Indigo halls of Imagined gods of Love, The walls conspire and whisper Into her ears Telling tales of unfaithful loves And unrequited desires -- The rags of threads once Tied at the Astans of Hamdan, Lie at her feet, as she sits alone Knitting desolation from the whispers To sacrifice at the altars of the imagined Gods of love