Today is the start of poetry month and I started the day listening to a BBC report on the (re)discovery of Persian poets in the West. There are many Persian poets, many of whom I had never heard of until, during my last visit in Kabul, I went on a hunting expedition and discovered that there was more than Omar Khayyam and Rumi. My search took me to the store that became the title of a book and I learned some about the intrigue and jealousies that play out when a (non fiction) book is written that brings in fame and riches. The same happened with the Kabul Beauty School – a book I enjoyed but around which there is much controversy.
I got news a few days ago that I will have one of my poems published in a Quaker journal. I had no recollection of submitting anything to anything, but a letter from the editor confirmed that I had, 10 years ago, sent in a poem entitled ‘Highway Poetry.’ I remember vividly how the poem just popped out, pretty much formed in its final form, during a particularly slow commute one morning. It will be published in the May edition of Friends Journal.
I haven’t written much poetry lately and what I wrote is of poor quality. But getting the acceptance letter made me go back to ones I wrote in the 90s when I was spending a lot of time waiting in airports for planes to catch, away or home. I would travel with my spiral notebook and write in my journal – always having paper available to catch a poem if one fell out of my head. Now I am too electronic for that. With my Kindle, facebook, my electronic blog, I do much less of the old fashioned paper and pencil writing and don’t always have paper handy when a poem pops out. This is one I ‘caught’ waiting at the airport l in Capetown:
Three women workers
Sitting quietly
In faded and ill-fitting
Blue uniforms
Waiting stony-faced
in the airport lounge
for instructions from on high
Nothing moves on their faces
Not even when
The supervisor
descends
And tells them to move
She said, “move it,”
The voice of power
And a different color skin
But nothing moves
not their faces, not their eyes
Then their bodies go
Taking them away
Only their legs move
Faces frozen
Telling the entire history
Of this country
To me, the stranger,
Sitting here, watching
Not understanding a thing
Sylvia's Journal 
I would like to hear more about the book store itself – what was it like, , who was there, what were they looking at – and the story of the controversy around the Kabul Beauty School…
“My search took me to the store that became the title of a book and I learned some about the intrigue and jealousies that play out when a (non fiction) book is written that brings in fame and riches. The same happened with the Kabul Beauty School – a book I enjoyed but around which there is much controversy.”