Saima Afreen
Poem No. 1 | For a Child of Kashmir
Child,
Look
A little paper-boat sways
On violet waters
Of butchered lullabies
On which your mother once put
A tiny tear of your dreams
And a firefly from her face.
Bullets
pierce
mouth of the molten moon
Your small universe
Weeps in your tiny palms
Stained with white blood.
Child,
Do not long for the moon.
Tonight
It will be cremated
By wolves in khaki:
Guards of ‘Peace’!
The thud
Of their boots
Trample upon the wails
Reverberating from the red carpet
Of fresh blood
On streets.
The night preening
Its blue plumes
Drips as broken sounds
From the rows of poplars –
Silent spectres
Of Doom…
Child,
Do not cry.
Your beheaded doll
Will find a grave
Amid dark pits
Of deadly shrieks
Left unburied.
Child,
Hold
Tightly the velvety wings
Of a crushed butterfly
Even if you see
Blades
Of green grass growing
Out of smashed skulls!
Hear,
The ghosts
Of smoke
Have just sung songs
Of Spring
Blooming
As bleeding hearts
From burnt roses of Nishat Bagh.
Child,
You will not get
A bouquet
Of colours.
In this land anymore,
Not even in the fractured fingers
Of your crayons.
Behold
Child,
Grey. Black. Red
Are the only colours left in Kashmir.
Forget the orange colour
Of your candy.
The brutal blue night
Will soon remove all hues
Except red.
The Devil in the chopper
Tries to erase
Verses written
On the white wings of the wind
With his fingers
Smeared with ashes of charred bodies
That burnt upon charcoal
Of myriads of mornings.
Fire.
The serpentine tongue
Swallows
Glittering pictures
Of fairies and dwarfs
In your story books.
Tiny sparks hiss
On needles of rain.
Child,
Go
Inferno
Engulfs
The morning star
That trembles
On the liquid glass
Of your iris.
Cover your pink ears.
Fables. Rhymes. Claps
Are drops of molten lead.
Stories of blood and gore
Flutter as bats
Licking the flowers
On the wallpaper
Of your skin.
Strange hands
Throw the wounded scarlet sun
In the black lake
Where Laughter was slaughtered.
Even,
The dead eye of prophecy is lost
In distorted maps.
See,
Child,
Forest scents
Try to mend the shawl of the torn sky
That your mother covered herself with.
Dirty scraps of blue cloth
Fall on catacombs
Beneath chinar trees.
Child,
Tell me,
Will the world ever come to know
What it means
To breathe
Inside a dead womb?
This poem won First Prize in a poetry Contest of Museindia – an online literary journal
Poem No. 2 | Tablecloth
History never gets old,
it is a jeweller that continues to polish Time,
breaks light into stained glass
before uncurling sodden alphabets
from thin fog. It searches for faces claimed by darkness
lights a few couplets
and watches
thin wrinkled fingers stitching
fresh daisies. Art of darning stories.
The mesh of crochet
and the mesh within,
too old to darn the torn mist collapsing above
the border, the broken china of childhood,
the fables over teacakes, rim of frail cups;
she wakes up the sleeping flowers
asks them their names…
they open their hearts
show Dunyazad
singing in velvet silence
busy with her needles;
this evening
the hem of the table cloth smells of stories
that she lived in, we all live in, stories that we all are
rest, including
this life
is fiction.
Saima Afreen is an award-winning poet who moonlights as a journalist with the New Indian Express as well. Her poems have been published in several national and international journals like Indian Literature, Muse India, and Notre Dame. She has been awarded a writing fellowship in Finland.