I touch Kashmir through your words
Of snow I find its fair skin turn
Dark in the eyes I see
Its green frozen in trampled ice
I hear strains of music waft
From strangulated corners where
The cold is alive and dead
Under old shawls
Your words are shadows
On the page where I am shadow
Looking for light in the trace of your words
That burn like fireflies
In the airy stalks of memory
You learnt from poets you loved
It is futile to expect history to have ears
For death yet you wrote letters to
Departed neighbours
I falter through soft chills of
Dismembered lines to find your poems
Are palms where memory smears
Its carbon of loss I see beauty hang its mirror
In shame as you sleep
And your poems die to wake you up
