Aria Aber

Si Aria Aber nagdakula sa Germany kun sain an saiyang mga magurang Afghan refugee. An saiyang librong Hard Damage (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), nanggana nin Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Sa presente siya sarong parasurat na nakabase sa Oakland asin nagseserbe bilang Li Shen Visiting Writer sa Mills College. An saiyang mga tula maluwas o nagruluwas na sa The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, Kenyon Review, The Poetry Review asin iba pa. Siya man an 2018-2019 Ron Wallace Fellow sa Unibersidad kan Wisconsin-Madison asin naggana sa 2020 Whiting Award.

Hard Damage

An Hard Damage sarong katipunan nin mga tula na minahapot manungod sa sadiri asin sa mga pagkukulang kaini. Sa saiyang mga liriko asin haros dokumentaryong mga tula, pirming pigbabalikan ni Aber an relasyon Afghan-American. Masususog pa sa taon na 1950, kun sain pigkokonsidera an kinaabtan kan relasyon na ini partikularmente an pagpopondo kan mga Afghan mujahedeen na nagresulta man sa terorismong paghiro kan mga Taliban. Pira sa mga nagtarau nin mga marhay na tuyaw digdi iyo an The Paris Review (staff picks), GQ, The Rumpus,Chicago Review of Books,Publishers Weekly,Atticus Review,NY Journal of Books,daniellejhanson.com, America Magazine, Catherine Barnett, kagsurat kan Human Hours,Sally Wen Mao, kagsurat kan Oculus, Yusef Komunyakaa, kagsurat kan The Emperor of Water Clocks, asin si Solmaz Sharif, kagsurat kan LOOK.

Pira sa mga tula ni Aber

Nostos

Afghan officials say they have uncovered a mass grave in an underground prison on the outskirts of the capital, Kabul, which dates from the Soviet era. —BBC News, 2007

Lately I’ve been moved by how

the skeletons were found: skulls with cloth

around the eyes, wrist bones tied by rope—

a miracle that fabric (what color

was it, what material?) has touched,

even witnessed, the suffering of those

two thousand men, who stood naked

with their eyes bound and were raped before

they were shot. Among them we suspect

lie my great-grandfather’s

and my mother’s youngest brother’s

remains. What is it with the disappeared

that survival, this dumb extravagance, insults us

so? I felt nothing when I slayed the Hajis,

my student, an ex-Marine, wrote.

In fact, those barbarians fell easy, like buildings

in Mazar-e-Sharif. What could I have

said? I praised the urgency of subject,

her apt simile. To fight, you understand,

was aimless. I’ve been primed for this,

for disappearance, for all my life. I dreamt

of my student that night, her voice muscling

the soft framework of memory, whistling

Leiche, Leiche, Leiche. Dearest, I wonder why

in English the body is both dead

and alive, but I know the blight of grief

has a heart and thus will love, and learn, and thusly

learn to hate—I want to believe that he, too,

settled porous into the light. He was twenty-one

when they took him in for questioning.

My uncle, I mean. Do not return, my mother

shouts from her sleep. Do not

return. His eyes were green.

First Snow

How easy for snow to turn to ice, for snow

   to disappear the light from the ragged

frame of chestnut trees around the warehouse

   by what’s left of wild chicory, scraped

sculptures, weeping dogbane. Hunger borders

   this land, while snow turns all to immigrants,

snow salts the embankment, where turtles wash ashore,

   literally hundreds of them, frozen hard

like grenades of tear gas thrown across

   a barbwire fence. But who of their free

will would ever want to climb that fence

   to live here, who would pray each night

for grace, hoping to pass through the darkened veil

   of shit, to bear witness to smokestacks,

wild champion, knapweed? Who’d loiter around cricks

   glistening with oil, which, once gone,

will, like death, at last, democratize

   us all? On potato sacks in the snowcapped,

abandoned warehouse, there huddle and sit

   the soiled refugees, bereft, cow-eyed,

picking dirt off their scalps, their shelled soles.

   Among them, wordless, is my mother,

and nestled on her lap is I, in love with the light

   of the first snow of my life, so awed

and doubtful still of what lengths the frost wills

   to go, and what shape it will then take—

Hades

Where did he go? I asked.

Where do the missing ever go?

Imagine silence, the tyrant, growing thick

over the casket lowered into the ground

with nothing resting on

its leather—just the red daybook

and the shirt of Rolling Stones scented still

with pine and cheap cologne, tobacco.

An entire population sunk

to the bottom of the sea. Plastic forks, black boxes.

Daily, filtered light gleams

on the gold teeth of the disappeared. There’s a pile

of nameless bones eroding the soil

under a thousand hungry mouths

of Himalayan blue poppy. And bullet casings

litter the dirt, glimmering like coins. A cloth

that, weighted with ice water, slapped his face

the way a mother would in rage

and grief. The day they buried into earth

the thing without the body,

all the apple blossoms, I heard, floated

back into the gaunt arms of trees.

Panluwas na takod

• https://yalereview.yale.edu/aria-aber-poetry-exile
• https://thecollapsar.org/a-poem-by-aria-aber
• https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/06/03/afghan-funeral-in-paris
• https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/exiles-promise-on-aria-abers-hard-damage/