I have seen your dreams

I know why you scream

Why the city of your heart is so utterly desolate

I see graves shimmering, with

Mountains on fire, windows shuttered

and empty picture frames

Vendors of rain litter your streets,

knocking down broken deodar doors

Slogans smeared on your empty walls,

promising that the revolution is in the air

Boarded-up lanes guarded by strays

Lead up to vacant homes, embers of

lost stories keeping fire barely alive

Even your distant skies, a screenshot of

paisleys inlaid with grief are

knotted into a prison

made of shattered glass

I have seen your dreams

I know why you scream !!

Comments

Unknown said…

Can feel the agony

January 20, 2023 at 8:34 PM

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.

Its Scary

Imran Qayoom would have turned 26 this October, but a CRPF bullet and lathis ensured that the only brother of two sisters would never see another birthday. A black flag, hung over the gate of his under construction home in the Bagh-e-Mehtab area, announces silently that Saturday will mark the 40th day of Imran’s death. Imran died on the 12th August along with 11 others who were victims of police and CRPF firing on that day, the day after authorities had imposed a curfew following the death of Hurriyat leader, Sheikh Abdul Aziz during the ‘Muzzafarbad Chalo’. At the time Imran was shot he was standing on the main road along with his friends watching the CRPF battle with pro-freedom protesters hardly hundred meters from his home. His friend, Suhail who was with Imran at that moment says, “ We were watching the protesters. When suddenly the CRPF started firing from one end of the road to another end. I looked to my side and saw that Imran was covered in blood, but he was still breathing....

Tasenda

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