The ordeal of Swat’s IDPs (internally displaced persons) is unending. Forced to flee their homes in the cool valley to make-shift shelters in smoldering plains, the 42 degree temperature in Mardan, Swabi, Noushera and Peshawar is taking its toll on an estimated 3.5 million population who are refugees in their own country. This piece of writing is to highlight the dilemma of our brothers and sisters caught up in the conflict, designed by foreign hands and our own political failures through the years.
As they stare from little windows of existence
From the wooden bridge, in the mountains
As the mist rises in its colors of remembrance,
There lies the valley, where beauty is suicidal
There lies home, where protection is nature
All in there, fleeting glance or permanence
The old days of reflection, spent in between
As they whisper, ode to change and for help
In there, lies the answer to our quest for brutality
As the smoke arises from snows of purity
The blood that flows in human rivers
Amidst beautiful snow, amidst gravity
As the new born find its feet and face
There melts, the human misery now
As seeds of this disease, reaches them
No longer forbidden and remote,
In all these years of its formation
Flows there our blood in this valley
Of you and me, as we kill all in our names
The great sacrifice to our voices of conscience
Wrapped up in million stars, this sky
As they stare from little windows of existence
At you, at me, this unbearable pain
As the new born find its feet and face!
Written by: Asim Khan
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