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

Comments

FULCRUM IAS said…

Lovely poem, Tasim. As I say always, enchanted.

April 22, 2015 at 3:39 AM

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

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