Afghan Women Writers’ Project
I highly recommend the Afghan Women Writer’s Project. Some of the poems are painful to read, many are beautiful, all are illuminating. I signed up recently for their regular email of new writing, and I have not been disappointed in the integrity of their posts; they give me pause to think, a new eye, a touch on my pulse.
My daughter Ciara, age 11, wrote this in response to a poem by Sabira that was in today’s email from the project.
Sabira is writing about the power of education, of seeing beauty desolated. She is sorrowing for her land, but she is sowing seeds of the future, of a peaceful land with no more “voices of guns and missiles.” She is sowing the seeds of the next sixteen springs, she is building the winter nests for the swallows of the next sixteen winters. She is tilling the land, her homeland, so it is ready for the next spring, the seeds of peace.