Moon at Half Past Noon

I was born in a room that remembers its size,
before the walls learned to whisper be less.
My blood is not a chronicle.
It is the iron taste of Kabul’s dust.
I am the exile who never left the house.

They talk of my cloth like a coffin or a flag.
Let them. Inside these pleats, it is humid. Human.
Mine.
I am not a metaphor for your evening news.
I am the woman smuggling a math book
under a tray of sweating tea.

They said, Dissolve. Become the texture of the wall.
But walls have ears. I know. I am the listening.
I speak through the static, shortwave, low:
You cannot bury seeds if you do not know the soil.

I have sat across from men who hold guns
like prayer beads, watched them legislate
the length and width of my shadow.
When the cameras died, I asked:
Does your mercy work on men alone?
The God I know hears the kitchen whisper
as clear as the call from the minaret.

My shelter is not a green light.
It is a damp basement, a scrap of cardboard,
a first letter drawn in the dark.
It is the patience of water wearing stone.
The quiet erosion of no.

They think they can cut a river with paper,
starve the valley, and call it peace.
I tell you now:
We are not waiting for spring.
We are the roots that drink the dark.

The fuse is not a metaphor.
It is a girl mouthing forbidden verses
in a room with no window.
It is the grandmother saying Queen
not as a story, but as a name she once held.

So let their verdicts dry in the sun.
Let their shadows grow long and thin.
My back knows the shape of every burden it has carried.
I am Mahbouba—Beloved—
and I am not a flame to be cupped.
I am the heat trapped in a stone at midnight.
Quiet. Inevitable.
Counting.
Beating in the dark—