Quote by Agha Shahid Ali: “I am told Kashmir is burning. I try to remember it: lake, hill, snow.”

Distance from a place you love — especially when that place is in flames — creates a particular kind of helpless grief. The speaker tries to hold onto memory against the news of destruction: not politics, not violence, but the simplest physical things. Memory becomes the only form of preservation available to someone far away.

This poem was written as the Kashmir insurgency intensified in the early 1990s and large-scale violence and displacement transformed the valley Ali had grown up in. He was living in the United States, receiving the news from a distance that made presence impossible and memory urgent.

Kashmiri-American poet, born in New Delhi in 1949 and raised in Kashmir, whose ghazals in English brought the classical Urdu form to American poetry. His collection The Country Without a Post Office lamented the violence in Kashmir with devastating lyricism, and he taught at many American universities before his death in 2001.