Four Poems by Parwana Fayyaz
PN Review 241, May - June 2018
Forty Names
I
Zib was young.
Her youth was all she cared for.
These mountains were her cots
The wind her wings, and those pebbles were her friends.
Their clay hut, a hut for all the eight women,
And her father, a shepherd.
He knew every cave and all possible ponds.
He took her to herd with him,
As the youngest daughter
Zib marched with her father.
She learnt the ways to the caves and the ponds.
Young women gathered there for water, the young
Girls with the bright dresses, their green
Eyes were the muses.
Behind those mountains
She dug a deep hole,
Storing a pile of pebbles.
II
The daffodils
Never grew here before,
But what is this yellow sea up high on the hills?
A line of some blue wildflowers.
In a lane toward the pile of tumbleweeds
All the houses for the cicadas,
All your neighbors.
And the eagle roars in the distance,
Have you met them yet?
The sky above through the opaque skin of
Your dust carries whims from the mountains,
It brings me a story.
The story of forty young bodies.
III
A knock,
Father opened the door,
There stood the fathers,
The mothers’ faces startled.
All the daughters standing behind them
In the pit of dark night,
Their yellow and turquoise colors
Lining the sky.
‘Zibon, my daughter’
‘Take them to the cave.’
She was handed a lantern.
She took the way,
Behind her a herd of colors flowing.
The night was slow,
The sound of their footsteps a solo music of a mystic.
Names:
Sediqa, Hakima, Roqia,
Firoza, Lilia, and Soghra
Shah Bakhat, Shah Dokht, Zamaroot,
Nazanin, Gul Badan, Fatima, and Fariba,
Sharifa, Marifa, Zinab, Fakhria, Shahparak, MahGol,
Latifa, Shukria, Khadija, Taj Begum, Kubra, Yaqoot,
Fatima, Zahra, Yaqoot, Khadjia, Taj, Gol, Mahrokh, Nigina,
Maryam, Zarin, Zara, Zari, Zamin,
Zarina,
At last Zibon.
IV
No news. Neither drums nor flutes of
Shepherds reached them, they
Remained in the cave. Were
people gone?
Once in every night, an exhausting
tear dropped – heard from someone’s mouth,
A whim. A total silence again
Zib calmed them. Each daughter
Crawled under her veil,
Slowly the last throbs from the mill house
Also died.
No throbbing. No pond. No nights.
Silence became an exhausting noise.
V
Zib led the daughters to the mountains.
The view of the thrashing horses, the brown uniforms
All puzzled them. Imagined
The men snatching their skirts, they feared.
We will all meet in paradise,
With our honoured faces
Angels will greet us.
A wave of colours dived behind the mountains,
Freedom was sought in their veils, their colors
Flew with wind. Their bodies freed and slowly hit
The mountains. One by one, they rested. Women
Figures covered the other side of the mountains,
Hairs tugged. Heads stilled. Their arms curved
Beside their twisted legs.
These mountains became their cots
The wind their wings, and those pebbles their friends.
Their rocky cave, a cave for all the forty women,
And their fathers and mothers disappeared.
A Survival Prayer
I
Those summer nights in Kabul, tranquility
Was in the orchard of apricot trees:
In their images and shadows.
What happened to Uncle Najib?
What happened to the neighboring apple trees?
The nights are unknown,
The mornings are disturbed by the darkness,
Wake me up, father.
This is not the city
I live in. Neither is that one
My city, which I have called mine.
II
A long river flowing exhausted
Across the spring season,
A stream of coal-filled rocks.
It flows, flows,
Hitting the shores, where the tulips are born with thorns.
Though my mother says:
‘The tulips’ petals are the praying hands of a woman.’
The tulips are frozen deep down
Under the river,
I feel cold over my hands,
Cover me, mother.
This is not the nature
I was born with. Neither is it in my nature,
To survive this river.
III
I pray to the clouds
For rain.
Instead, the sound of shootings,
Some men scream,
Into the night.
The sound reaches my ears so fast,
I feel mortal again.
Hold my hands, brother. If there is a war again,
I will not pray for peace. Nor will I call it a war.
The Cursed Man
He owned two mansions, two barns,
The woman, who the Khan fell in love with at
First sight.
Her name was Sabar Gul, the patience flower.
She was living with her mother in a clay-made hut.
There was an oath passed between the elders,
Gul was engaged to her cousin since her childhood.
Therefore, the Khan could not ask for her.
In a series of dark nights and winter days,
Khan was driven to Gul,
Finally,
One midnight he pulled his horse and quietly
Seized Sabar Gul and took her to his private Burj, mansion.
Gul disappeared. A fable spread:
One of those middays as the summer sun was burning
Bright on the shuddering wheat fields,
And the
Farms were waiting for fall,
Sabar Gul, the daughter of that deceased nek mard, good man
Ran away with her Mashuq, beloved.
Gradually rumours spread in every village.
Though, the next day, Khan was back in the village with his horse,
Nothing was more pleasant than his secret feelings,
And all the rumours seemed pleasing. He thought.
Next dawn, before the women woke up to bake
Their breads and the shepherds to play their flutes,
Gul was brought back to her village.
She was left leaning, her back against the wooden door,
Unable to knock, she waited for the door to crack open.
The Khan looked around for a while,
Gazing at Gul – and her surroundings –
To protect her from any wild wolf.
The door opened, and the Khan raced behind the bushes
And mounted his horse.
He and his horse returned to their mansion.
She remained unseen around the village for
Months, her mother locked her in, far from
The villagers’ sight, anger and horror.
Until people found out that
That night, in that dry night, under the moon,
The Khan was missing too, and so was his horse.
Sabar Gul’s mother cursed him day and night,
Until the curse turned into a poison,
In the same season, a year later,
Khan’s body collapsed on the ground,
After twelve days on his bed,
Khan died young and handsome.
My Grandmother’s Ruby Ring
My grandmother wears a deep red ring,
A ruby set into a silver plate.
She lived in the valleys.
An orphan girl, herding her sheep in the fields.
A virgin: not yet menstruating, she became the bride
For another orphan. A ring was given to her
In a man’s name, she was taken away.
She became a wife and lived in the city,
Caring for the man, his four brothers
His four sisters and their sad stories.
Seasons passed by, hardships:
She was separated from her husband
And went to live with her three boys and their families.
Throughout her separation,
She had always dreamed about her husband sitting
Under the shade of the apricot trees, or watering the
Tomato plants in the garden – she was Zulaykha and
He Yosuf – she always referred to him
As the prophet in her dreams.
She does not complain about the wounds over her hands.
A mother in law, a grandmother,
And gradually she became
A great-grandmother.
She had never shed a tear over the shattered clay roofs
Under the snowfalls.
Now her story is about an old woman waiting for death.
The ring goes to the one who washes her body.
0nly the woman who washes her well, dresses her properly and
Pays respect to her body would inherit her ring.
Parwana Fayyaz was born in Kabul, Afghanistan in 1990. From the age of seven to sixteen, she was raised in Quetta, Pakistan. After finishing high school in Kabul, she enrolled in an English language immersion program and subsequently began her undergraduate studies in Chittagong, Bangladesh. She transferred to Stanford University and earned both her B.A. in 2015, with a major in Comparative Literature (with Honors) and a minor in Creative Writing (Poetry). She moved to Cambridge University to pursue a PhD in Persian Studies at Trinity College in September of 2016 and took up Junior Research Fellowship as the Carmen Blacker Fellow at Peterhouse, Cambridge University in October 2020. Her first collection, Forty Names, was published in 2021. Its titular poem won the 2019 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem.
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