Ignoring voices in Kashmir

“We’re inside the fire, looking for the dark,”

one card lying on the

street says, “I want

to be he who pours

blood. To soak your hands.

Or I’ll leave mine in

the cold till the rain

is ink, and my

fingers, at the edge of pain,

are seals all night

to cancel the stamps.”

The mad guide! The

lost speak like this. They haunt

a country when it is ash.

“Everything is finished, nothing remains.”

I must force silence

to be a mirror

to see his voice

again for directions.

Fire runs in waves.

Should I cross that river?

Each post office is boarded up. Who will deliver

parchment cut in paisleys, my news to prisons?

Only silence can now trace my letters

to him. Or in a dead office the dark panes.

Excerpts

from “A Country

Without A Post Office” by Agha Shahid Ali

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