A Year Later

She keeps her tongue until they settled 

the logistics: weather, "it was best to go before

winter turned the mountains impassable."

A small party travelling light stood a better chance

than the slow moving security of a convoy. She feared

adding another old-world stone to the load

he was already carrying, a final straw to undo

their tenuous existence--whatever life they'd imagined:

trust would have to ferry them through.

He mulls their options, the cruel cud

of hasty promises made in the heat of urgency;

if there is another way, he can't see it. Compromise,

whatever the truth might have been, is a ghost surrendered,

long since vanquished. The glimmer of hope he nurtured

through the ill-natured decades has metastasized;

the ancient cancer of tribes, a malignancy gnawing

at the nostrils, counsels one road left to travel. Every other bridge

has long ago been burned: they cross this one--or they die trying.

She scratches an X through another square, joins the day

to the well of days already siphoned from faith's

diminishing reservoir. By now she's become

all too accustomed to the stone tucked inside her cheek,

its small comfort, the emptiness of no news

being their only news of when to expect some news of when?

She's learned her way around, how to scavenge, 

out-fox the guards, to make this home their home

for now. What matters is keeping them in place,

filling the days, the wolf from the door.

She holds her tongue, waits for when they've settled

the logistics. 

He weighs the hours, the promises,

with a quiet desperation for what's been kept, calculating

the days, In transit, a hollow phrase, echo of abandoned:

the dredge of choices, some misinterpreted sentence, 

missing apostrophe too harrowing to contemplate

what he doesn't know. He cannot speak, give name to

the consuming fear he's stepped them out onto a ledge,

a rock too duplicitous to hold.

Ken e Bujold

Author's Note

written for the Afghan refugees, to whom promises were made, but few it seems with the intention of ever keeping

Reviews

[softlyfall]

Makes me want to crawl into bed and cry. Thats all I can say. Powerful writing but it hurt.

[red93]

Excellent Ken - we had a whole raft of Poems on Writers Cafe during the Afghan evacuations last year - and it is a country now that the International Media has simply dropped and shifted their focus to the Ukraine Conflict. One dreads to think what is now going on in Afghanistan but it won't sell newspapers.

[John the Baptist]

That people would be willing to subject themselves to such an ordeal rather than endure in place says much about the desperation of the people of Afghanistan. Nation building may have had good intentions behind it, but the outcome is reflected in the sufferings of people like those described in this work.

[Ken e Bujold]

yes they are John. I am saddened and more than a little shamed by my country's snails pace at fulfilling our promises to those we for lack of a better phrase, used before discarding