Pain to be documented
for the sake of civilization.
Pain, language of the unspoken,
censored, plugged and precluded.
Pain of mothers daughters and lovers,
of sons, fathers and admirers.
Pain of separated caged minors
of mums in the dread for their teens.
Pain of kids deprived
of children’s play and tempers.
Pain of teachers in empty
schools like haunted sanctuaries.
Pain of hungry babies of fathers
jobless due to curfewed roads.
Pain of half-widows wedded
yet unmarried waiting
in silence, broken-hearted.
Pain of unmarked graves
nameless, persecuted, unclaimed.
Pain of people denied
of honour, esteem and existence.
For it is the suffering, which one day
shall emancipate the persecuted, and
plague the tyrant.
History is nothing more than
your anguish engraved.
Man in his arrogance committing the inconceivable,
pretending to be divinely indestructible.
Suffering, enduring, caring,
liberates the resilient
Freedom is yet attained,
no matter what the era pronounces.
This poem is inspired by the on-going situation in Kashmir where people have been put under total physical and emotional lockdown for nearly three months now. There are numerous reports of human rights abuses and illegal detentions including of minors. Kashmiris have been put through a collective punishment and suffering.
Dr Mudasir Firdosi is a Kashmiri psychiatrist, writer, and poet. https://twitter.com/drmfirdosi
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