On a bus, crowded with sheep

        and goats and people

          a woman hands me her baby to hold,

      beckons, “Would I like to keep the baby?”

               “Perhaps not, I am not sure.”

        We stop at a café

            in a sea of rock

                 We stop again for chai

          in a mud hut at night

     I the only woman.

            Camels in Kabul

               and men on horseback

          hard and proud

                 gun shops everywhere,

        “Would I like to buy a gun?"

                 “Perhaps not today.”

           Fierce, remote and desolate

           yet somehow this land speaks to me            it

captures the imagination

            moves some primal instinct,

                 primitive and hard,

             speaks to me in a language I once knew,

             not unlike my own land -