Kunan Poshpora, a Memory
Do You Remember Kunan Poshpora?
When I walked through the mountain, I saw a million shards of glass
Each a mirror and a face.
Their names:
…
…
&etc
and a generation more women from Kunan Poshpora.
Soldiers’ marching feet replace the sound of BBC radio and lullabies here.
Girls born with broken arms,
and boys with stones in their hands.
Who hears the cries of pellet-blinded children,
Mōj wailing over bodies of shroud-clothed children,
Mōl weeping into their hands over mass graves?
Or the men who speak to God as tar carves rivulets into their backs,
Hands toward Jannah but bound, hanging,
Nearly lifeless in some cell.
Ali, you wrote “in the city from where no news can come…” 1
And it is still this way.
(“What will the newspapers say?”) 2
In a place where every season is possible, it is always winter here.
Snow and ice never melt
When they’ve frozen over hearts,
A desolation so cold the sun has died, too.
1 From Agha Shahid Ali’s poem, “I See Kashmir from New Delhi at Midnight,” from The Country Without a Post Office , 1997.
2 Over 20 years on from Kunan Poshpora, not a single charge has been brought against the military for those events.