The daily Roznama and 3 other poems

We are terrified rabbits,
Falling into whiteness

(I)
So, phone the greying fire tenders
put out the remnants of my sleep
lest frozen hallucinations explode
don’t call out to me.

Cordoned heart is under arrest
(polite euphemism – arrest)
lest reinforcements be requisitioned
don’t call out loud to me.

Half slit rababs and half clogged
harmoniums play funeral veins
lest they churn another limerick
don’t yet call out loud to me.

After long, I long for some calm
What afflicts me today?
lest my skeleton be paraded
don’t yet call out loud today to me.

(II)

So, routine prisons could not prevail
upon the heart to turn stone
Foolish heart is foolish indeed
Bullets retreat off dead stone.

If you disown me
Who can lay a claim to me?
The tradeoff of desires
is cast in no firm stone.

Thus, did some muddled calm
concede defeat to me:
Marching regiments of your memory
met a pedestrian stone.

Which world was resurrected
by my blasted blood?
The map of the exploding street
lies stamped on a burnt stone.
(III)

So, every day you inquire the price
and temper of the prisoners.
How will they word their liberty –
whose prison is your beauty.

Separated from you
A day dream consoles me:
You are bound to be
tormented by my memory.

Why do you insist
on conversations with sad airs?
Every tearing idler
recalls a different sob story.

No expert committee
can translate senile graffiti
Modern, the city may be
its alphabet is ancient memory.

(IV)

You forecast a deflation
of my deposited sentiments,
No SRO has been signed
declaring I must be in love, I will not exhaust your tears.

All life you preached
tears can’t alter destiny
Society of folklore of death
too withholds endorsement, I will not exhaust your tears.

Please request your mourners
to place on record my condolences,
Your elegies have filed for impotence:
My pretext shares have crashed; I will not invest your tears.

I have long imagined
we will laugh over our meeting
The mutilated minutes failed
to convert the difference, I will not spend your tears.

Were it a one off circumstance
I could rethink my promise
Injury marshals routine raids
in all mapped directions, I will not exhaust my tears.

The dark cloud in my hand wants no more than this land that flies past in the scent of our saffron. The saffron wants no more from the passing convoys than the crushed fennel of our summer just like the poems promise when caught in the searchlights of covert operations.

The dotted butterfly that calls out to me over a phone call from my sister wants no more
from our garden than the glint of the summer moon on a rifle hung on the pear tree.
The butterfly saddles our flowers and instructs the last chag of the winter sun to
ride them into the curfews of past.

Why fear the song of the bullets? The poems assure us. It says summer comes disguised
as a mad singer who sings of yaadgar from the emptied cities and dust from
the beloved’s grave. When the war is over, the singer will play the lute of the last summer
whose blood never dried on the shirts of the recent dead. In his lute lies a fire
that will tell our ashes apart from your dust.

We don’t want to return home like the soldiers returned in the shade
of the crushed sun. Take us to the fields of the gul gulshan gulfaam left behind by the soldiers
Gather us in your hands of kaend-taar and imprison us in the hollow
of your name.

∼
yaadgar: relic/memory
gul gulshan gulfaam: flower, garden and bloom. Also a propaganda show on Kashmir aired during the 90’s by Doordarshan
kaend-taar: barbed wire.

Sad

like blinking traffic lights
at dusk staring at a November crossing

like the dotted grin of the road
stolen stones lined up along its jaw

like a hasty U turn by a barricade
manned by stone effigies

like half-closed shop shutters
peering at sly hawkers

like speeding sirens
near carcasses of apple trucks

like official front page condolences
on the demise of local op-eds

When we remain the last speakers
of the dialect of damp decades,
who will listen to the cry of the sirens
blaring in the redrawn city?

The warm sky on the policed highway sags
like a woman’s eyes drooping from dementia.
The car radio hums Ghalib:
Never did they all get reincarnated as roses and tulips
What beauties must have been attired in earth
and forever disappeared from view.
The road and sky are one plane making it
impossible to breathe. The sirens
nail our hands together. How shall we reach
the perfume of the white hee posh?
Shall we too be left in want as Zauq who flew off from the
curfewed garden pining
for the reticent breeze?
It can’t be. Draw out our will
when the wounded sparrows hover in half circles
over the calligraphed roads of Khanqah
just past the domed grave of the emperor’s mother.
Draw out our will:

Let the assailants mispronounce our names
when they draw fresh gods from
the lakes of our ancient myths.
Our names must leave in the middle of poems
that they learn to walk past the barricades,
then fly past the fluttering flags,
earn the wrath of the new gods,
and disappoint the clever snipers
expectant on the barren hills.
On the fortieth anniversary of the lost summer
we will anoint someone to look us again
in the eye, and defeat us again that we never forget….