Tags
pashtun, woman, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, Afghanistan, Women, Pakistan, Karachi, burqa, shuttlecock burqa, kabul, pashtun woman, blue ghost, blue burqa, burqa blue, afghan woman, opressed, oppressive garment, kandahar, shore, invisible, ban the burqa
I wrote this poem in March (2012) — a couple of months ago — but finally managed to complete it. This is one of those rare poems that just came to me in a split second and I somehow managed to write the whole piece in less than ten minutes. I’m now finally sharing it here, on my blog, with my readers. So, enjoy! 
***
She walks in the valley of death,
Like a solitary blue ghost
Hard gravel under her bare feet
And a heavy blue cloth draped over her fragile body
She breathes, barely,
But only through a blurry mesh
Soft sighs of defeat
And a heart heavy with despondency
She weeps for her lover,
Who was snatched from her arms
And annihilated right before her very eyes
She weeps over a flooding tarn
Her empty soul drowning
In an ocean of scalding tears and despair
She weeps and weeps until she is spent –
Until she could bleed no more tears
For she has lost all that was once so pure
And beautiful;
The love
The laughter
The passion
All gone…
Like feathers in the wind
Leaving her with nothing
But tarnished memories
And, yet, she continues to trudge laboriously,
Like an abandoned ghost
Along the empty banks of a land torn apart
The pieces of her past flying everywhere,
As she desperately tries to capture,
Every precious shard of her broken memory
They slip from her fingers
And disappear in the empty vastness around her
But she doesn’t give up
For she continues to walk –
Walk towards a destiny unbeknownst to her…
© SesapZai March 2012
