From Zero Bridge

a shadow chased by searchlights is running

away to find its body.

On the edge

of the Cantonment, where Gupkar Road ends,

it shrinks almost into nothing, is

nothing by interrogation gates, so it can slip, unseen, into the cells:

Drippings from a suspended burning tire

are falling on the back of a prisoner,

the naked boy screaming, “I know nothing.”

The shadow slips out, beckons Console Me,

“Rizwan, it's you, Rizwan, it's you,” I cry out

as he steps closer, the sleeves of his phiren torn.

“Each night put Kashmir in your dreams,” he says,

then touches me, his hands crusted with snow,

whispers, “I have been cold a long, long time.”

“Don't tell my father I have died,” he says,

and I follow him through blood on the road

and hundreds of pairs of shoes the mourners

left behind, as they ran from the funeral,

victims of the firing. From windows we hear

grieving mothers, and snow begins to fall

on us, like ash. Black on the edges of flames,

it cannot extinguish the neighborhoods,

the homes set ablaze by midnight soldiers.

Kashmir is burning:

I won't tell your father you have died, Rizwan

but where has your shadow fallen, like cloth

on the tomb of which saint, or the body

of which unburied boy in the mountains,

bullet-torn, like you, his blood sheer rubies

on Himalayan snow?

I’ve tied a knot

with green thread at Shah Hamdan, to be

untied only when the atrocities

are stunned by your jeweled return.