Musty fumes belch out

of Kabul’s downtown sprawling mass

of rambling rickshaws, tooting Toyotas,

trotting horse drawn carts,

heaving and straining

with the weight of rotting carcasses

and the salvaged wreckages of time.

But she does not sigh with disgust.

Her breath is taken away.

She sways her head gently to and fro,

chadour hanging loosely

The ancient breeze of darya Kabul

blowing through her hair,

which she now absorbs, gladly,

in the throes of her freedom,

because the Talibs have been chased out of town

and the misty sun, casting its gaze,

gives her the promise of a new age

a prospect of progress,

shedding the old skin

of the worn out trends of myopic mullah men.

She strides, confidently, past

A seated apparition on the sidewalk

who sits cross-legged on a flattened cardboard box,

living behind a worn blue, gigantic shuttlecock,

a row of chadri clones laid out before her

displayed for only 500 Afghani.

But this woman from nowhere

would make jealous even the eyes of Socrates

as she sits on her throne, the universe,

where she basks in eternal lights

which flood through her, like the rolling sea,

reducing the world around her and the cosmos

to a floating speck of dust,

which would have lived in the shadows

if the light of the One had not revealed it.

And while the winds of time and war

wreak havoc  around her,

beneath her prison,

she smiles

because she has freed herself

from the shackles and cells of time and space

for she had learned to recite the Name

until the Named was all she witnessed

and now she bathes in the Sun, mesmerised,

while selling her clothes, seeing to her brood,

putting up with her poor excuse for a life,

gazing, unfettered and unrestrained,

at the haunting beauty of His Face.