In Poetry of the Taliban, a sword beside a flower.
Inside a narrative
on love, a stone tracks a stone across the page
from a community
well to hospital. An unwound turban is an ex-
tended metaphor
for a wound. A goat is a roadside device.
A camouflaged
field-gun jumps and smokes under a hard rain
of shell casings.
The ringtone of a phone going off beneath
a robe sounds like
muted reports of weapons bringing down
migratory cranes
from a dust cloud. They might have been storks
on a day so clear
you could read into it. Perhaps the scene
involved a crowd
of men, just returned from a mass
beheading in the hills:
trouble with young, out-of-wedlock couples
dancing.