Kashmir
written by: Amita Sarjit Ahluwalia
@AmitaPaulIAS
The blonde Welsh girl wanted a saffron carpet
With a bottle green border and flowers
In red and white and blue all over it
Of course with green creeper foliage.
The Kashmiri shopkeeper served us hot kahwa
And persuaded her to buy a papier mache box
In toning colours with a maple leaf design
While he found her just the carpet she needed.
I ended up with a soft pashmina shawl
Delicately embroidered with a paisley border.
We went back to our houseboats by the Dal
On shikaras draped in festive upholstery.
The evening news said five terrorists
Had been killed in an encounter in Kupwara
We ate our taabaq maaz and goshtaba in silence
And avoided talking about the violence.
Snow glowed like gold in the sunset
And like silver all night in the high Himalayas.
(Pen Name of Amita Paul) I am a retired civil servant but at heart a poet and teacher. I write, mostly poetry, in English, Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi. I was awarded the NISSIM International Poetry Award (First Prize) 2019 and then the Reuel International Award 2020 for Non-Fiction Prose by The Significant League, a well- known Creative Writing Group on Facebook. In January 2021, the Destiny International Community of Poets based out of Wakefield, England, UK declared me Winner of their Poet of the Year 2020 as well as Critic of the Year 2020 Awards. My poem 'The View from a Porthole' was chosen as the first among two featured poems on the NaPoWriMo website in April 2021. My poetry has been featured regularly in every issue of the monthly poetry e-magazine GloMag edited by Glory Sasikala and published from Chennai in India for over a year now. Recently, several of my poems have been included in ‘Impressions and Expressions', an anthology of international poetry published on Kindle in June 2021, and in the Yugen Quest Review: The Magic of Poetry, an anthology of poetry published by the Women Empowered group on the internet in July 2021.
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