Away, somewhere in the North yesterday;
when the sun dawned and there was no light,
and the moon yawned but the sky was without night:
An Eagle attacked a Dove.
Mighty wings: spread like swords,
Besieging the white woolly feathers,
like a helpless prisoner, held captive by the phoenix of death.
”How long would I be your yardbird, if I may ask?
Forget not, your dungeons stand on my soil,
Soil, we nourished and toiled with our sweat,
It shall tremble today on the smell of my gushing blood,”
bellowed the Dove.
Dim, as it was, by the dusk,
and the snow shrouding the wounds of the little bird,
the dove was spotted alive, deluding the vicious Death,
Mighty, as the Eagle was,
Arduous, was the bird to kill;
and Peace in the bird, the mightiest.
Yet, he was wounded, bleeding on the snow
like red in the white, like war in the peace.
The Chinar, down the lake, died too;
Few saw a thousand Eagles invading the long branches and mutilating the Tree,
They say, “Might’s might looted the grace of the tree and brought it down.”
That night, I woke up quivering, on a nightmare’s assault,
“The Chinar, masked, with the black wicked wings all over;
ghostly, with the squeezed garnet autumn leaves,
entrapped, like a worthless beauty, barely visible to the eyes.”
The tree died slowly,
with falling leaves buried near the ailing trunk,
under the canopy of satanic Eagles.
They desired to be buried together,
each falling leave with each falling stem it belonged to;
hard as it was for me to put them together:
Unmarked, they were
Unidentified branches, with Unidentified leaves.
Yes, the Jhelum was Silent at the Eagle’s conquest;
they forced cowardice, and threatened to make the waters red,
Yet, the river chose to remain unharmed
preserving a symbol of beauty and demarcating the living and the dead,
like the last-leaf at the top of the dead Chinar,
dwelling amidst the evil
like a dormant seed, eager to breathe life again in Chinar at Eagle’s fall.
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Filed under: Poetry
