Tasenda

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 !!

If only Life was resolved In small moments of Celluloid Clarity, Where breakfasts and brunches and sad little lunches Had small interludes, where we lived our lives Where we were caricatures or men and women of certain types All our flaws, all our smiles, all our little hopeless dreams Would be resolved in time for dinner, with space left for small snacks If only Life was resolved In tiny trespasses along Alliterating allusions, Where time and pain and all those little hurts Would pass in a montage, set to silent soundtracks Where ghost-quiet nights were woven together into magical quilts Held together by the threads that were unknotted from latticed shrines When the invisible returned from shadows of memories, to be whole again If only Life was resolved In small moments of Empathic epiphanies, Where prayers and amulets and objects of unverified provenances Had the power, to turn fireflies into starry nights Where our messy little truths, no longer colli...

Mou’ji , sing me a lullaby tonight Too many faces made of white smoke Smother me when I close my eyes My dreams are on a leash, and Olive green monsters stalk my breaths Mou’ji , sing me a lullaby Mou’ji , burn my clothes while I sleep Too many friends have bled on the Shirt, You brought for me when Eid last came For when the demons come for me, Let them never handle threads sanctified by blood Mou’ji , burn my clothes while I sleep Mou’ji , take away and bury my school books My classroom is now a sandbag bunker My fingers will trace words in the dark now Every page full of the names of the dead One by one, till I am one of them Mou’ji , take away and bury my school books Mou’ji , don’t cry when they bring me home For even if there is no heaven, I refuse to be choked My hands are scarred from the edges of stones But iron chains are heavier still Even when gilded with fool’s gold Mou’ji , don’t cry when they bring me home ...

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.