A Poem For Friday

A third set of landays, or folk couplets, from the women of Afghanistan:

May God make you into a riverbank flower

so I may smell you when I go to gather water.

*

Of water I can’t have even a taste.

My lover’s name, written on my heart, would be erased.

*

I could have tasted death for a taste of your tongue

watching you eat ice cream when we were young.

Earlier landays on the Dish here and here.

(From I Am the Beggar of the World: Landays from Contemporary Afghanistan, translated and presented by Eliza Griswold, photographs by Seamus Murphy, to be published in April 2014 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. LLC. Text copyright © 2014 by Eliza Griswold. Photographs copyright © 2014 by Seamus Murphy. All rights reserved.)