A Poet and Bin-Laden

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Five

Heh little bird,

heh real live little bird, sitting

proudly on a post, nonetheless

you will not achieve that living

tree in my memory. It’s strange,

when I look at you, although I

see this tree,

I myself,

like a man who has fallen on an unfamiliar road

and then goes through the back gate into his yard,

I cannot return to anything in my life...

Here is the poplar, there the narrow lane...

Heh little bird, why are you trembling so?

- Belgi

I was intending to write about the second Batken war in the same way as I did about the first, but the documents brought back from Afghanistan by my journalist friends included a set of wrinkled white sheets of paper that had been neatly arranged in a file with the title “Autumn 2000”, and I decided to offer you the conten