Paradise
on day 30 of the Kashmir blackout
Here’s a ghost dragging her crumpled soul to the lake.
The waning moon spills its light into a coin, into her balled
fist, and I wonder if she remembered the poem. Firdaus,
an emperor called this valley once. Out of her blooded
camisole, the knife still buried between the lips of her womb,
she descends into the water. Her skin pale like a wilting lotus,
her wounds hollow like the shape of a murder, like the sins
swallowed by a purple sky, this word reaching up
to my throat and exploding without a sound. Paradise.
Bearded poets once lay under the chinar and fell in love.
Once these valleys bristled in the dew-laced romance of
exotic songs. Now the vultures nest atop a Mughal
mausoleum. Hear the cackling silence of whoring kings.
Another raped daughter, another forgotten fist. More dead
coins in the charcoal lake. The bards sleep in the skin of
beasts tonight. It is easier in this paradise to be a wolf
than a man. Easier to howl in desperate agony than
to pen a fractured sonnet with rubber pelleted tears.
