Finding the Familiar in Strange Places

We wandered lost on the dust-tamped streets

until dusk crept up on us, stalked us like prey.

Far past the place of twilight and lamplight,

to the unwired, then quiet in sleep.

 •

Earlier the day shouted with life. People busied

with aliveness banged tin roofs, swept raised steps,

unlocked and threw open

battered storefronts so that each small shop looked

all the world a stage of trifling drama, unscripted

but familiar. Men, cross-legged on carpets,

woman invisible behind veils behind walls beneath rules.

Only the men sipped tea, sucked hookahs, reclined on rugs,

scattered burnt umber brick red burgundy wine woven,

warp and weft, in patterns older than my country’s name.

More rugs, folded and stacked in towers,

slant-sloped against the tumbling divides.

 •

They say night falls and they say it without meaning

but dark landed with a thud, a weighted

braided rope-choke at the neck. Fear elbow-poked ribs.

The hiss-whispering spy-eyed suspicious

peered the peep hole broken boards.

Suddenly,

a fierce fiery light shot up from a distant ground.

And vanished.

 •

He didn’t see it. Didn’t believe I had. Until again it was.

And just as abruptly, was not. We trod toward the illuminated,

manuscript yet written, tripped and stumbled toward its absence. Until

flash, visible in the fickle light,

veiled figures, shadowy-crouched and haunch-waddled,

a coven-brewed chorus of clanks and claps

and murmured rhythms. A tinny pot lid lifted,

an earth hole uncovered, light burst to outshine the stars.

A shoulder-deep reach into dry clay clod, face scrunched

against the bronzing heat to pull out

naan. Tossed, puffed and steaming, onto a plated pile,

more dough, stretched and slapped against the side

of the in-ground oven, then clang,

the dropped lid again snuffed the portal of light.

A woman, hunched-short, tore off a hunk of warm bread and

offered it up to we gaunt and haunted foreigners

a comfort new, yet familiar

an underserved kindness of strangers in the dark.

Note: I traveled overland from Italy to India with a friend when I was eighteen years old. We took rickety local buses through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. At some point, I realized how incredibly lonely I felt being the very rare woman traveler in a country where all the local women kept their faces entirely hidden behind burkas. This was a magical moment in Afghanistan when we stumbled upon a group of women working after dark to make bread, burkas shed for safety reasons. The simple kindness this woman showed us has stayed with me for decades. I'm writing up memories from that trip and some seem better suited to essays and others to narrative poems.