Quetta Compendium
Balochistan Province, Pakistan


Balochi:

The Baloch in the beaded cap
is a modern man, wears his beard
on his sleeve, not his face.  He’ll even let
his wife work after babies, if
he’s lenient.  Sure, he’ll lob a hand grenade
over a wall now and again, but what’s
some shrapnel between long-lost enemies?


Pashtun:

The Pashtun, now, he’s all tradition,
gives you hell for glancing at
his women, talks a language
sounds like rocks between the teeth,
wears those hats and turbans like
the Taliban.  He’ll serve tea, however,
to the dirtiest of strangers, and die
for you if you’re his friend.


Everyone Else:

The rest, they’re all settlers, even if
they’ve been here sixty years.
The Sindhi with his hand-dyed cloth,
the Afghan with his donkey cart, they’d
better watch their backs, be thankful
for a house at all, not just a tent
like all those gypsy folk.


(Women:

There’s a bit of burqa blue in Quetta,
but mostly shawls, big as sheets, making women
look like walking bolts of cloth.  Cloth, in fact,
is all that gets them out the house – the men can run
the other errands, but won’t go near
the fabric shops.  If you see a lady
on the street, respectfully look away.)
 

The Lost Ironic

There’s another bomb, in Lahore
this time.  Waking up to the scenes,
I lose my irony again.  Oh, it
will come back, just like it did
after I lost it, the pundits said,
after 9/11.  They’re almost always
wrong, with their damn polls
and mile-a-minute mouths.  Why don’t
they shut it and come to Pakistan,
where everything decries prediction,
where images of orange-bearded guards
with bleeding, shrapnel-shredded legs
accost you from no-longer-safe Lahore,
where you can laugh at the reports
of a bomber’s head found in a tree,
stop laughing, laugh again, forever caught
between irony and terror, brain
pulling the pin on its internal grenade
while your hands flutter in your lap
as if to say, “By God, what a crazy place,”
where almost every day you can lose
satirical sense in a moment, get it back,
lose it, get it back, over and over,
a joker in an execution cell now
bound for heaven, now for hell.

Stairing Up

Mansehra, Pakistan 

In Pakistan the concrete soars
to second floors on heads of men
                stepping up
a scanty frame of wooden boards.

Others tread a steeper stair
to paradise fair, mounting there
                on wave on wave
of volatile, tempestuous air.

We all work to meet our god
whether we plod or, rapt, explode
                with rising flair
into sweet smoke of our jihad.

To view an audio-visual version of this poem, the words voiced over footage of men carrying concrete to the second floor of an under-construction building (the scene that inspired the poem), click here or go to:

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOlLtQVo3IU