1.
What kind of spring is this
Where there are no flowers and
The air is filled with a miserable smell?
2.
Handcuffs befit brave young men,
Bangles are for spinsters or pretty young ladies.
From the Online Exclusives for the Fall 2007 issue of Inquiring Mind (Vol. 24, No. 1)
Originally published in Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak, copyright © 2007 by the University of Iowa Press, www.uiowapress.org, all rights reserved.
Shaikh Abdurraheem Muslim Dost is a Pakistani poet and essayist who spent nearly three years in Guantánamo with his brother, Ustad Badruzzaman Badr. Dost was a respected religious scholar, poet and journalist—and author of nearly twenty books—before his arrest in 2001. While at Guantánamo, he composed thousands of lines of poetry in Pashto, most of which were retained by the U.S. military after his release in April 2005. In October 2006, shortly after Dost and his brother published a memoir of their Guantánamo detention, Dost was again arrested by Pakistani intelligence. He has not been heard from since.
Shaikh Abdurraheem Muslim Dost is a Pakistani poet and essayist who spent nearly three years in Guantánamo with his brother, Ustad Badruzzaman Badr. Dost was a respected religious scholar, poet and journalist—and author of nearly twenty books—before his arrest in 2001. While at Guantánamo, he composed thousands of lines of poetry in Pashto, most of which were retained by the U.S. military after his release in April 2005. In October 2006, shortly after Dost and his brother published a memoir of their Guantánamo detention, Dost was again arrested by Pakistani intelligence. He has not been heard from since.
