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Two Poems
Aria Aber
29.10.2025Poetry
POSTCARD TO KABUL
He was a boy then, his heart a lily, white and green.
Sunlight whetting the outline of Bab-al-Khalil –
The sky says: this is God’s door,
and an old man squints into the camera. All my childhood
leads back to this card inside the vitrine, a framed daguerreotype
next to a gold chalice and photographs.
Blue ink on crumbling paper. It was desire,
those orange trees, the horses running through the night.
Feels like home here, he wrote to his first wife.
He only travelled twice. Once to leave Kabul to become a refugee
and twenty years before, that long journey – train, and plane, and jalopy.
He was just a boy then, my great-grandfather.
There was a line about a red-haired girl in Jaffa
and eating plums, and silverware – remember? The sea will spell
it out for you. It sees you go. Al-Quds, he called his life. Study ruins,
he wrote. And stones: wield them like a prayer.
*
PROVIDENCE
Because you were born into disastrous circumstances,
fate was all that counted, and what you could blame –
a life of misery is a life that makes meaning out of everything.
You pick up a pebble when you walk the beach pulsing with seals
and it means Yes. You see water washing over a mossy rock,
the green brushed to the side like hair, and it means No.
A mawkish feeling blooms in you, and you remember
Kafka’s diaries: a joy, to want a knife twisting in my heart.
The sea yearns for you, or rather, you yearn for the sea
to leap into, its great knowledge a cryptic knowledge,
but a knowledge nonetheless. Just being in its presence
exhausts your heart. I want to die is the sentence you think
most frequently and the sea says, Why not? Just do it.
And God with his three prophets and orchard of apples
hates women, you know that. What you want to know is
if it goes both ways: if fate got you in, will it get you out.
*