Imagine a Passage from Kashmir to Palestine
Imagine a wound beating
inside a bloodied shroud
Imagine people running away from the strip of Gaza
bombed in the sea and sand.
a dawn in Ramadan counting holes in their pale chests
looking for bodies through smoke and dust coming from
the smashed house of bones
imagine a child crawling in cemeteries and bombed hospitals
on small patches of land
imagine a disease in the stomach and tails of Caspers
Imagine a town in Kashmir
Caspers in the streets and squares of downtown Tral
settlers in uniform moving out their heads
blowing whistles…
Imagine spiraling roads
mustard coasts of yellow across Diver, Kuchmull, Luro , Lurgam
Imagine a village where Crackdown runs for three days
men asked to dig their graves
women peeping through chimneys in the attic
catching giant shadows of settlers
Imagine a funeral march
a memory that catches the sight of
of Martyrs boots
rescued to home for burial
voices, as of a rushing crowd, and the pauses in their silence
that crack my memory into long boredoms
Imagine the Day of Badr
Imagine people marching in the rain to Dadsur
meeting the face of their dead martyr
Imagine the hissing sound of their muddy bottoms
Imagine a mother
waiting for her son
Ishfaq, one early morning in his light yellow dress, maybe
nestled to his mother as she makes tea in the morning
Imagine her eyes skating over the frozen shops of fire
stains of blood that left their counterparts at a burnt shop near M.Y Medicate
Imagine an alley heaved up with sunshine
Imagine now a disaster finding its way out with dust and light
Imagine the eyes of a crowd hit by pellets
Hundreds wounded as they wait for Hum Nasheen
Imagine the silence of bullet holes,
burnt shops,
and sobs coming from half-burnt bodies asking for water
Imagine a passage leading to Palestine
Imagine a people in Kashmir
by the roads leading to Sharief Abad
opening their arms with salutes
Imagine a memory enveloping colours
drawing behind dark furrows
from the nose tip to the unconscious
always shifting by the unexpectedness of tense
Imagine a scream for a place in someone’s memory
of dislocation and genocide
Imagine a world hoping for a parcel of numb hands
untouched by political sagacity
Imagine a language losing its diction and words
Imagine a lullaby sung in the backdrop of war
Imagine a wound crying for its shroud
Imagine! Imagine a wound at the other end of the bloodied passage
Imagine a passage from Kashmir to Palestine
Hours of Grief
There is grief to be teleported
from across the balcony of the murder
to the tormented lines of palms
What use of grief when
the night is over?
I know the troubles and fears
There's grief to be teleported into the dark interval
without the love of a woman
let alone the difficulty of this cosmic thrust
the boy that was born out of your memory
What will you name him?
lookup through the bare blue skies
no book or bread
however neat and clean
can calm this dissatisfaction
this must be a deliberate act of love
Before the dark what was my love like?
All night, bold contemplations and quiet correspondences;
In the terrifying darkness of the soul, how does a poem survive___
___ after long hours of sobbing?
Hands near my shoulders
What would the world be like, once
bereft of lovers?
The sunken taste of oranges
impetus in the road I came across
to hold up the wet towels of grief
At midnight, nausea plunges into needles
to stitch decaying truths
A thing of poetry
to vomit out chokes
my throat
from up above the grave of my friend
there develops an unsettling rumpus
long arms to grasp a vast loneliness.
I stare upon the ridged skull behind the ear lobes.
there was an emergency
things I said to you,
I will escape from the sea,
no screams
none at all
mobile data is turned off
By the lake, the ferryman dismantles all the secrets
like aborted babies into a new ocean
this ugly war plumes tenderness
in skies
voices that say
Humans are made of grief
as
I trudge along the graveyards to the last embankments
of eternity
Temporary cabins where they washed my family portrait
wetness of deeds that cloak souls
while they leave for stars from the swollen aisles
I see rain falling over the humid
charcoal streets
Hands from graves that pull me down
bring home a face so pale and bloodied
covered in bandage and cotton
a face so stuck in time and space
that he ever smiles
a terrible beauty that shrinks time into
a molecule of hope
I have been taught not to talk about death
but life in its prettiest sense
They conceal love in defamations
There is pain to avoid
there's delusion to be transfixed in her eyes
Am I to question this secret life and lie now?
Some days, you are Masoodi
On other days you are Maryam
I am empty without the heart
I am empty without you
You hold the night’s pandemonium
heartbeats,
that slowly reveal the maps of lovers &
tablets of sleep
How large is the history of grief
How long shall the Yaar stay in the ruins
The Shroud of Pandemic
pour some plain facts
in this poem
pour some placid poetry
over his grave
he won’t come back to
announce the schedule for the cricket tournament
he’s buried somewhere near
the alley where he threw grenades
or the backyards and open fields
from where he would break the cordon
before the pandemic
they killed
the last rebel near the bed of Wusturwan
In the pandemic
we pilgrimed to Wusturwan and
found his name
carved on rocks and trunks of trees :
‘Hammad’ ‘Hammad Hizbi’
you do not see those names again
I tell them to weaponize this plain fact :
rain drizzling from roofs, August rain
recollecting my tears
August sunshine
heaving up the elephant corpse
dampness lodges spiders
Spiders sinking into the pellet collecting cobwebs, and
poetry drawing lines of prophecy
And then in December
inserting knives into walnuts
collected from the beaks of crows or
under T-shirts tucked in trousers
Inside the sub-district hospital
he is wiping pictures from the gallery
Photos he took near the Dam
while fishing, or the winter album :
‘he thinks life would be fine if he wipes history and formats his device ’
tears fall into his eyes
October chill drops in again
Outside a cycle shop, when Caspers pass by
he imagines ‘roads long rain’
An old man, a cycle mechanic, says
‘you smile like your father, you have his eyes ’
I imagine
life
like the August rain
never dies
Amma gulps down warm water
‘they will not spare the Tableeghis,’ she mumbles
the disease is everywhere;
crossroads, stations
subways
outside the departments of
our University
This is a Panopticon chamber of secrets … the grenades
seem to be nowhere… every walking man is a grenade
In the Pandemic, they blast
a house by the forlorn edges of NH44
they take away their bodies to the places
where Jhelum enters the other side of the line
Ather writes his name on the trunks of Apple Trees
His father watches him fade into the white flood of dandelions
And the wails lock into the offices of Justice
In my hometown Tral
military occupation replaces the traffic police
what is left of history :
white Cemeteries on small patches of land;
People passing by every day… that is the routine
they stand upright in the stomach of Caspers
and the tails of jeeps
this shark moves like a disease
and it compels the trespassers
to wear masks …
the diseased officer wears no mask
Ten lakh troopers by the lake in Kashmir
lights circling the city
our hearts are dull and dark
for we accept to live in a situation
that has cracked upon us the blues of a decomposed dusk.
what it means to a soldier or an SPO
locating a grin on our faces
while he finds an Afghan warrior on WhatsApp display picture
what it means to us
to have a solitary STF checkpoint
that was never there before the Pandemic,
Today, those checkpoints are permanent.
what it means to their boss
who stops us from moving, smiling
or not smilingfor wearing no helmet
the skull that is bound to be shot,
to get cordoned off by the Military settlers
while you were only having a picnic around the cliffs of Shaldraman Tral.
You have to yell,
‘hum civil hai, hum civil haiʼ
until they lower the muzzle
They will ask for IDs
They will take your pictures
They will ask at last if you were here to smoke weed
whether you saw any men walking with arms
What will we ever do
this humiliation lurks in our throats
like the smoke of hell
What does the boss care for?
he won’t forget to give you a lecture on morals, kindness, duty and discipline
What does it mean for me to return home alive
shrugging shoulders
while I step forward in the kitchen
and offer greetings as
Assalamualaikum ... Assalamualaikum
Kamran Bashir is a final-year English literature graduate student at the University of Kashmir. He takes great interest in exploring writers from around the world. Milan Kundera, J.M. Coetzee, Dostoevsky, James Baldwin, Rilke, and Karl Ove Knausgaard are some of his favourites. He is also deeply interested in cinema, having spent considerable time exploring the films of Kiarostami, Terrence Mallick, Satyajit Ray, Andrei Tarkovsky, Ingmar Bergman, Nuri Ceylan, and Jaffar Panahi, among others.