Poet’s Note: My poetry often reimagines the lives of women and revisits South Asian as well as European myths from the perspectives of women characters. History of the subcontinent in general and Kashmir, in particular, runs all through my poems. They try to demonstrate how life can simultaneously hold survival, revolution, and unquenchable love. Dreams, obsessions, and passions are at the core of all my poems. The narratives of the poems are the privilege often given to women or trees and rarely even to inanimate objects such as a closed and a half-open file on a table talking to each other.
My Grandfather’s Clock
Ever since his clock was diagnosed with dementia
time has been uniformly slow.
He eats wild grass to pass time
And leaves us little by little
daydreaming of Hollywood divas
as Egyptian princesses in slowtime lapse
Liz Taylor — Cleopatra,
serpents on her breasts,
“Fade out,” she whispers,
Cut to pyramids of white delirium,
He babbles gritting his teeth
Tearing off maps of valley forlorn with time
I am constant as the Northern Star.
I am a mender of bad souls.
What a meaningless pastiche —
By Postulates of Relativity
Laws of time and space are same for all frames of reference.
Yet doesn’t it depend on who is measuring what?
Hymns from the Lockdown
On this Sabbath of Sabbaths
when the black stone in Mecca
and the neon museums in Vegas
are locked down
for believers and gamblers
alike
a sudden silence invades the shops
in a city where sorrow sleeps
all night on pavements
I ride on the folds of night
searching madly for you on
paths you marked on my palms.
What lovers are we really?
You leave me sour in Autumn
I greet you back in sweet Spring.
Let me in!Let me in! Let me
in your heart’s quarantine
to try mop up shadows
of your solitude. I have no life
outside of you — come with me
at the first ray of sun
from the one-eyed heaven,
when God’s mercy melts
into nothingness.
Flyovers
When the mercury rises like Icarus
and burns the soil of the city where
the homeless — scum-of-the-city — shelter
under flyovers with rusted ridges,
sing lullabies from their ribcages
to a sleeping nation.
What can I
offer you my fellow sufferers?
My apples too are stolen,
the trees in my valley
drowned themselves in lakes.
Peace Be Upon your broken bones.
Tell me, what is worse for a gift:
a forever disease or an endless war?
You are silly like us, they say,
your gift will survive it all. Mad
nation will hurt you into poetry
and yet keep its madness.
Postal Delay
The sky held its breath
while I lost you again
In New York onHouston Street
No— the deserted four-way
In Srinagar on a troubled day at Lal Chowk
near some slot machine—
in Piccadilly drinking a quick coffee
In Dover Laneor among the trees
in Baramulla juggling the winds—
I don’t remember
Baramulla Boston Bangalore
I’m limping over lands without names
Remember, last year you bought me a clock —
Or was it the year before?
I hate counting time —
That clock of yours frightens me
As I go to sleep here
In America they must be waking up—
Unwilling children being dragged to school
Tuna and potatoes for breakfast.
Fridays are greyish —
They used to be white
Here, shadows chase me like ghosts
I hide in the clock holding the hour hand
I saw a frozen shadow: it looked into my eyes
Only the silence was audible
I received a dead man’s letter
I read it though the meaning had changed
Imprison the letter I insist
Lodge it in the City of the Dead
My last and only wish is
Punish the delayed letter
For mapping my destiny —
Mute the alphabets
On a cold marble heart
Over my grave.
The essay and the poems are part of our Poetry Special Issue (January 2022), curated by Shireen Quadri. © The Punch Magazine. No part of this essay or the poems exclusively featured here should be reproduced anywhere without the prior permission of The Punch Magazine.
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