Moon at Half Past Noon

I.
They think they have taken the sky.
They have only taken the cloth.
Beneath it, the river flows silent under her toes:
the ridge of the nose, the valley of the breath,
the estuary of the pulse at the wrist.
I am mapping a country they cannot see.

They built a roof over the sun, stone by stone.
My eyes learned to see in the dark, alone.

II.
My resistance is not a clenched fist.
It is a palm held open,
learning the weight of a daughter’s head.
It is the knot in the thread that refuses to break
while mending the torn seam of tomorrow.
It is the yeast in the dough, rising in the dark bowl.

A shroud they gave me to wear as a dress—
I am stitching a sail from its quiet distress.

“I am not a silent witness.”

III.
To the world with its conferences and condolences:
We are not your broken project.
We are the a fading tableaux you refuse to read.
When you eat your morning bread,
remember our hands
kneading dawn into existence behind a locked door.
Do not save us. See us.

You watch from towers of pity and stone.
Do you hear how we hunger? We eat grief alone.

“If you abandon these women,
you abandon the soul of Afghanistan.”

IV.
And you, in your rooms of pronouncements:
You speak of protecting the bird,
then solder the cage.
You name us the heart, then forbid the heartbeat
from leaving the house.
What grows in a field that fears its own seed?
You quote scripture but forget the verse:
God breathed into her, too.

You lock the school door and call it Heaven’s will.
But God’s name is whispered by girls on the hill.

“The religion I know does not walk alone.”

V.
So here, from the heart of the shrinking room:
We are not waiting for your spring.
We are the perennial.

We are seeds under the snow, hard and deep.
We taste the coming spring in our sleep.

We are seeds under the snow.
You think we are dead.
But we are alive.

We are the root that finds water
through cracks in the stone,
the tuber storing light underground.
The girl reading physics in the whisper-
language of her grandmother’s lullaby.
The sister teaching algebra
with a stick in the ash of the hearth.
The future is not a headline.
It is a serum in the bones.

VI.
Do not mistake adaptation for surrender.
A river that meets a dam becomes groundwater.
Deeper.
Unstoppable.
Drinking the rock until the rock gives way.

My silence is not empty, it is a well.
I am counting the stones of this crumbling hell.

“Do not mistake my silence for absence.
I am counting everything.”

VII.
And to my girl, tracing her name on the dusty pane:
Your lineage is not a chain. It is a loom.
You are the new thread, strong and gold.
Weave. The pattern is yours.

Daughter, weave your name bold in the sun.
The story they ended has only begun.

“I am the history of this country.
I am not going anywhere.”

We are the hands steadying the frame,
the breath that says again,
the song that has no end,
only depth.

Zendegi baz ham. / Zendegi baz ham. / Va baz ham.

And more life | And more life | And more.