“i inhale verse, i exhale valley”

By Baseerat

Introduction: Breath and Memory

“Habba Khatoon – ‘bozmay chon rang…'”
When I think of Kashmir, I don’t just see snow or chinars, I hear verses. Half-remembered, unfinished poems, stitched into lullabies, hidden in my grandmother’s whispered prayers.
To me, Kashmiri poetry has never been a chapter in a textbook. It’s breath. It’s memory. It’s mine.

The First Poem

I was nine when I first wrote a poem. It was clumsy, too many adjectives, and a line about the moths that sounded like it had been stolen from a lover.
But I remember how my fingers trembled, not from cold, but from the thrill of naming something that felt unnameable.

پمپیرو کرِتھ شامہَس گَتھ
پٲن زَولُتھ چھے ہَ یارَس پتھ
شامہُ کَیازی دُدوکھ چھے
مُحَبّت ونتھم کُہنٛد چھِے
A moth passed through a candle and circled it
He surrendered himself entirely at his beloved's feet
Why does the candle also carry so much sorrow?
This love it chooses is nothing but pain.
  

Lal Ded: Soul Notes and Spiritual Confusion

Years later, when I discovered Lal Ded, it felt like meeting someone who had always been inside me. Her vakhs, those brief, blazing bursts of mystic philosophy, weren’t just poetry; they were soul-notes. They didn’t ask to be understood. They asked to be felt.

“What is it that I was before this birth? What am I now, and what shall I become after?”

And I, a teenage girl scribbling on the back of my science textbook, realized that someone had articulated my spiritual confusion 700 years before I knew how to spell “existential.”

Habba Khatoon: Melancholy Queen

Then there is Habba Khatoon, the poetess who turned queen, whose verses make the very air ache. I didn’t ‘study’ her poems; I soaked them up like one absorbs sadness on a lazy afternoon.

My mother once shared with me that Habba would sit by the river and pour out her sorrow to the wind. I try to do that, except my river is now a Google Doc, and my river is full of keyboard clicks.

“Bozmay chon rang, me chu wandai poshe madano…”
“Come see me, I’m the tulip of your garden.”

Isn’t that what all poets say in some way? Come see me. Come recognize the flowering ache inside me.

Mahjoor: Hope as Resistance

Growing older, I recognized poetry was much more than love and longing; I began viewing it as an act of defiance. Everything in Kashmir is political, even silence. Especially silence. And, when all else fails, poetry is frequently the sole form of expression left.

Ghulam Ahmad Mahjoor did not speak in riddles. He invited spring when all we had was snow. He turned the farmer into a hero and the gardener into a revolutionary.

He did not seek to be celebrated; rather, he sought to be heard.

And I find myself wondering: How would he express himself about today? What metaphor would he use for barricades, blackouts, internet cuts? Would he say lost sons fell like chinars?

Agha Shahid Ali: The Exile Who Wrote in English

When I first read Agha Shahid Ali, it felt like discovering a wound you didn’t know you had. His country without a post office didn’t just describe a place, it was a place. It was Kashmir, but also a metaphor for every young heart trying to make sense of belonging and erasure.

“Everything is a metaphor for departure.”

Shahid taught me that you can mourn your homeland even while living in it. That exile isn’t just when you leave, sometimes exile begins the moment your voice is no longer heard.

“They make desolation and call it peace.”

Not because the line was powerful, but because it was familiar. I had seen that desolation. I had walked through it. And now, someone had put it in words.

Today’s Poets: Instagram, Ink, and Intifada

In recent years, poetry in Kashmir has slipped from the shelves into the streets. It’s on Instagram, in voice notes, on protest banners, and even in the whispered defiance of schoolgirls who write couplets in their diaries instead of essays.

Young poets today, many of them women like me, are not waiting to be anthologized. They’re writing now, raw and real. Their verses don’t ask for permission. They name names, show scars, and hold nothing back.

“I am the girl with WiFi in one hand and war in the other. I don’t pray, I post, and that is resistance too.”

There’s something holy in this chaos. We are not just inheritors of poetic tradition; we are continuing it, in new tongues, in tweets, in truth.

What Poetry Has Given Me

I often think about what I’d be without poetry. Perhaps just another girl caught between curfews and dreams. But poetry gave me a compass, a way to make sense of the unspeakable. It taught me that metaphors can be more accurate than news. That sometimes, rhyme remembers what history erases.

Kashmiri poetry has been my rebellion and my refuge. It has carried me through heartbreak, hopelessness, and the maddening weight of questions with no answers. And maybe that’s what this entire tradition is — a long, aching attempt to make meaning in a place that is constantly trying to be misunderstood.

In the End: The Valley Writes Back

Kashmir is not just a place. It’s a poem still being written. From Lal Ded’s spiritual fire to Habba’s romantic melancholy, from Mahjoor’s calls for justice to Shahid’s lyrical exile — the poetic lineage of this valley is stitched into its soil.

And now, in digital fonts and café corners, it’s being reborn, by young voices who still believe that poetry matters. We write because we must. We write because silence here is never empty, it is sacred, and it is full.

And perhaps, in every verse we whisper into the ether,
the valley listens.
And the valley, somehow, writes back.