Always still dark

This still born darkness

Tearing through the night

Has ruled over us for so long

I have forgot, what it was

To feel the sun in my eye

It has been this way, ever

Since I lost my way, somewhere

Between Nietzsche and Camus,

When darkness came riding a Horse,

White as light and heart just as black

The legion in me, held its peace

Thinking here at last, peace is at hand

But wrong we were, like every time

Evil was too arrogant and we were too vile

It chose not to hide in the dark

But in the light

Landscapes of misery as far as

Eye can see, illuminated by the moon

Of despair , the half-dead along the path

Mark the way to the house of

Storm.

The Walnut doors hide the

Tempest within, screams of joy

(or are they sighs of sorrow),

ring the air, taking apart my hope

on an assembly line till

nothing is left, except a placard, which reads

‘Always, still Dark’

Comments

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.

Chapter 9: Madness

I hold onto the ledge of sanity by the edges of my fingernails polishing a tune that i heard long ago on radio Kashmir, sandwiched between propaganda and farmer's show, where they taught how to sow blood in fields of saffron to reap a harvest of dead bodies mutilated with joy and skinned alive by bayonet edges and threshed by a machine made of army boots I hold onto the ledge of sanity by edge of my fingernails playing an imaginary santoor, made by the last santoor master of Srinagar, its wires made of Human tendons and its small wooden hammers, bones of young poetess its fickle frame crushed bone of orphaned children trafficked from mortared houses into army camps disguised as play grounds I hold onto the ledge of sanity by edges of my finger nails dreaming about refuge in the asylum of ugly emperors and handsome beggars hiding behind masks of iron, smelted by gunpowder made behind the mosque made of stone, where th...

Tasenda

Search This Blog