I call. You’re stone. / One day you’ll look and find I’m gone. – Poetry of the Pashtun Women

[The landays] lilt internally from word to word in a kind of two-line lullaby that belies the sharpness of their content, which is distinctive not only for its beauty, bawdiness, and wit, but also for the piercing ability to articulate a common truth about war, separation, homeland, grief, or love… the couplets express a collective fury, a lament, an earthy joke, a love of home, a longing for the end of separation, a call to arms, all of which frustrate any facile image of a Pashtun woman as nothing but a mute ghost beneath a blue burqa.

Mother’s Day

Mother’s Day Coming home late from my daughter’s preschool’s Mother’s Day tea, a feast of banana-walnut muffins made by those who’ll, one day, discover elements Q and J or become Secretary of […]

Palm Court

By Susan Lilley   My treasured mom died in 2007; later that year I visited my daughter in Tallahassee, Florida where she was attending college. Together we found the place my mother lived […]