Image: © Charles Eastwood
i.m. Fada Mohammad
Years ago, on a long-haul to Singapore,
Kabul appeared on the seat-back locator map
tracking our flight path: below us was a place
where war never dies, but at 12,000 meters
the window held only the pale brown creases and folds
of The Hindu Kush.
Geography and luck.
And now your name travels ahead of you, Fada,
as I read in the online Anchorage Daily News
about the cherry trees in your family’s backyard;
how you, the eldest, studied
to become a dentist: a clinic in Shaheed Square
where your father thought you had gone,
not knowing
you’d been diverted, drawn
into the wake of another rapidly departing
empire /administration / boots on the ground
of a country too easily considered bootless;
that your image would be caught,
shrunk
to a wobbly full stop on an upheld phone:
a momentary passenger, swept
from a climbing cargo plane,
hands sliding off what they almost held:
the body of the thing, its living armour.
____
Mark Granier poems have appeared in various outlets, including The New Statesman, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Review (UK), The Friday Poem, Anthropocene and Magma. His sixth collection, Everything You Always Wanted To Know, was published by Salmon in 2025.