CARPE DIEM
For Agha Ashraf Ali
You light a candle
Carp the darkness
With your usual flourish
Debone a carp
Add a pinch of salt
In your carpeted kitchen
Discourse on the next course
To scrape or not the fish head,
Gaadkalley: Honorific.
You offer a scrap of history
Bestowed once by the people
On the Big Crap who betrayed them
We seize the head
Before the diem carpe us
And raise our glass
To the disappeared carpenters
Of Kashmir
A parched paradise
By Rafiq Kathwari, whose first book of poems is forthcoming in April 2015 from Doire Press, Ireland. More work here.