Book & Copyright Informaiton
©Kanina Dawson, 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll-free to 1-800-893-5777.
This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Edited by Elizabeth Philips
Designed by Tania Craan
Typeset by Susan Buck
Printed and bound in Canada
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Dawson, Kanina, 1975-
Masham means evening / Kanina Dawson.
Poems.
ISBN 978-1-55050-550-4
1. Afghan War, 2001- --Poetry. I. Title.
PS8607.A962M38 2013 C811’.6 C2012-908199-X
Issued also in electronic format.
ISBN 978-1-55050-551-1 (PDF).--ISBN 978-1-55050-723-2 (EPUB).-- ISBN 978-1-55050-730-0 (MOBI)
1. Afghan War, 2001- --Poetry. I. Title.
PS8607.A962M38 2013 C811’.6 C2012-908200-7
Available in Canada from:
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Coteau Books gratefully acknowledges the financial support of its publishing program by: The Saskatchewan Arts Board, including the Creative Industry Growth and Sustainability Program of the Government of Saskatchewan via the Ministry of Parks, Culture and Sport; the Canada Council for the Arts; the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund; and the City of Regina Arts Commission.
Dedication
For my incredible daughter –may you never be afraid to spill your coffee.
Love always, Mom.
CONTENTS
Kingston, January 2007 – 1
Flights In – 2
Landing in Kabul – 3
The Road to Bagram – 4
Souvenirs – 5
Kabul University – 6
Earthquake at Camp Julien – 8
Electoral Candidate – 9
Knock-offs – 10
July in Brishna Kot – 11
The Morning Commute – 12
The White School House – 13
Firefight – 14
Working for the Coalition – 15
The Wrong Crowd – 16
Repatriation and a Rainstorm – 18
Helicopter Crash – 19
The General’s Briefing – 20
Casting the Net – 21
Shades of Grey – 23
Incoming – 24
Soft Things – 25
An Awning of Birds – 26
Friendly Fire – 27
Little Bird – 28
Medics on Their Break – 29
Heavy – 30
Fishing for Taliban – 32
Optics – 33
On the Wall – 34
Start of the Rainy Season – 35
Drowning in a Kharez – 36
Killed by a Suicide Bomber, December 6 – 37
Driftwood – 38
Dangerous Men – 39
Hearing from God – 40
Fawns – 41
Flights out of Howz-e Madad – 42
Man From Uruzgan – 43
Death Like Divorce – 44
Omar – 45
Mass Murder and a Dog Fight – 46
Life on the Forward Operating Base – 47
Embedded – 48
Panjwayi – 49
Not Wasting Time on Griefs That Don’t Matter – 50
Halfway House – 51
Seasons in Kandahar – 52
Self-Immolation – 53
Life in a Cemetery – 54
The Only Chair in the Room – 55
Dust Storm at Kandahar Airfield – 56
Forecast – 57
Disconnected – 58
Taliban – 59
A Night in Hospital – 61
Ahmadullah’s Toes – 62
August – 63
Naming The Sound That Took His Life – 64
Notes on a Soldier – 65
Car Bomb – 66
Burying the Rabbit – 67
Market Scarf – 68
Rain – 69
Last Looks – 70
Horizon Pool –71
Masham Means Evening – 72
Kingston, January 2007
An itinerant sky is what’s wrong –
its winds that shift and blow, its clouds that hang
in shades of grey over students sipping coffee,
their laughter and lofty sounding books crowding out my thoughts.
It’s snowing. Everything smells of wet hem.
How this winter wears me out.
Watching others with their pocketed iPods, their trendy
suede boots, I notice I am not nearly stylish enough and that I text real slow,
like the growth of hair and nails.
Around me people study, they learn
linked head to head, or form a line to the cash like an isotherm.
Their smiles are all the same temperature.
I speak only to my coffee.
In it, the desert blinks. It sees me,
seizes me with its frayed rope –
the twine of old men made older by war,
binding each pomegranate in its crate.
I turn my face to the window. I go back.
I remember what it was
to feel alive in that place,
to do what mattered.
How under that sun, my skin,
like a husk of melon, was sweet.
Flights In
Weightless shake of plane keeps me awake.
In the semi-dark I hear the sound of soldiers sleeping,
involuntary legs afraid to be still,
heads lolling, the smack of chins falling
forward onto flak vests heavy as lead.
I keep my rifle tucked between my knees.
Farther down the row in the belly of the plane,
a couple of sergeants are reading with their helmet lamps on,
reminding me of home, of flashlights under the sheets
and my daughter, laughing
as she lit her face from beneath.
We made forts under the stairs.
At the airport she wouldn’t let me go.
Eventually I had to hand her over, broken-
hearted, her limbs as limp as her damp hair.
How unfair
that I should think of this now,
desert-bound among the cargo netting and men,
our plane droning on, our wingtips flashing in the black
somewhere above the Gulf of Oman.
Landing in Kabul
We spend hours in the air, en route to Kabul.
I sleep until something like an impulse wakes me
and I know it’s time to fumble for my helmet,
put my flak vest on.
A loadie moves through the dark, hand over hand
towards the back of the plane. He steps carefully
between our feet, a flashlight in his teeth.
He carries a pistol and something like an extension cord.
We are all roused from sleep.
There’s a pause in the air, a slight downward shift
like we’re tilting off a shelf, then I hear
the mechanical windings of our descent
and the plane falls into nothing I know.
I know it’s not nothing, but still
I am shaken, weightless as we bank
left and right, up and down, avoiding
what lies below – mountains of the Hindu Kush
and shoulder-fired weapons.
My ears feel about to burst.
When we land it’s night and I’m surprised
to see the lights of Kabul, twinkling, climbing the side of a hill
like Grouse mountain in Vancouver.
After the ramp comes down and I regain my feet,
to be Vancouver City Police
moving through traffic in Granville.
The Road to Bagram
Horizons away from where I am going
we stop to change a tire on a road leading north.
It’s littered with scrap metal, red and white painted rocks
telling us to be careful of mines.
Nearby is the faint clinking of goat bells
and the remnants of a checkpoint
where an Afghan guard is banging his pot against a metal post.
A speed bump in the middle of nowhere is what he tends to.
Long ago he might have kept a garden or read books.
Now he smokes hash and merely stares at us as we pass,
his AK slung, his kettle hung on a hook.
The wind makes a moan that cuts across the sun,
kicking up dust devils near an old Soviet tank
destroyed over a decade ago – its side ripped open,
its turret popped off and flung fifty feet
down a gravelled slope – nothing
history remembers. War came too many years ago,
scattered too many teeth among the rocks
where the goats now graze
and where the guard goes to take a shit –
uninterested in the lost jaw bone of some Russian
whose parents no one can name.
Souvenirs
An Afghan man is smoking something harsh,
sifting prayer beads through his hands,
giggling at my arms – bare but for a watch.
His teeth are dark like tarmac, like tobacco.
Or the heat I see shimmering in shades of brown
west of the mountains where he’s from –
land of Massoud and pakol hats.
When the Soviets were here, he downed helicopters
and held freedom by the hip. All these years
he’s managed to survive. Now in the shadow
of a post 9/11 airstrip, I browse the market,
buying bandoliers and Red Army badges,
his Soviet souvenirs.
Kabul University
The principal shows me in to her office
through a door that is cracked, punched
full of bullet holes.
Her heels click on the floor,
a post-Taliban luxury for a woman –
to make noise.
She serves us green tea with honey
in glasses that are chipped
and we ignore the smell of mildew
in the hallways as we sit – a smell like lamb’s wool
left soured, sweating in the heat.
On the hills behind us, demining operations
shake the walls with the occasional controlled blast,
rattling the windows as we stir our tea, our spoons
trembling against glass. A rain of plaster
falls from the ceiling, but the principal doesn’t flinch.
She barely bats an eye. Just smiles, amused,
at the dust in the air, at the pistol on my hip.
I can tell what she’s thinking –
that this war is a mountain.
What good against it am I?
Some girls have gathered in the doorways to watch us.
Unveiled, they are giggling and graceful.
Outside it’s a different story –
a wordless ushering of blue burqas, whispering
along the street, shuffling home in sandals, feet
the same colour as the dirt.
The principal tells us that even in Kabul
a girl can still lose her nose, her face,
her life, if she’s not careful. If she doesn’t stay
covered up. You know, she says, rising to shoo
boys away from her window, their hands
pressed against the pane, we used to wear pants here.
She smiles again, more sad this time,
and motions for me to come see the place outside
where last week an aid worker was shot to death
in a courtyard that used to be filled with flowers –
roses and rhododendron.
Earthquake at Camp Julien
Last week we were eating breakfast, Jess and I,
sitting in the tent while the cooks peeled potatoes,
when the world suddenly went dizzy. Our ears rang
and something wriggled underfoot. I told him
stop moving the table and he said he wasn’t.
Later we would learn that an earthquake
had devastated parts of Pakistan, reaching
down into Kabul. That a dozen school girls
had died when their walls collapsed.
We felt bad, but we’d already been there awhile
and told ourselves how that kind of death
was better than being killed by Taliban.
They hated girls and killed them in ways
way worse.
So when the earthquake hit, Jess and I
didn’t think in terms of loss. Instead
we told cock-sucking jokes from Team America
and spiralled out from the tent, laughing and falling,
weightless in our ignorance of what was to come
like passengers in a plane about to plummet.
Electoral Candidate
Woman in the Kabul marketplace
canvasses to jeers, the eyes
of her electoral photo gouged out.
Like a Taliban commander
she sleeps somewhere new
every night – letters
pinned to her door, telling her
to walk away or face rape
as reprisal.
Even her brothers say she’ll only bring shame.
Together they decide
her fate for her instead –
to hold her down by the ears, to slit
her stomach until it grins.
It’s a doctor who tells me this,
describing how he tried
to hold back her insides,
to plug her stomach
with his fist.
Knock-offs
In the ops room this morning I despised
the pile of pirated DVDs
recently acquired from the market
and Tim’s new Rolex –
a knock-off that he bought
from an Afghan at the gate.
I hate how Tim told us
we’re not here for altruism.
Then he looked right at me –
like I was some kind of liability
because yesterday at the airport,
I threw some kid a bottle of water
so he’d stop chasing our truck.
So maybe later he and his friends
wouldn’t learn as fast to hate us
or take money for blowing us up.
Tim keeps talking about it.
He won’t let it die.
When I try to tell him
there are two sides to every coin
he says – drop it. Then sighs
and spits chew into a cup.
You can’t afford to be soft out here, he says.
You want them to get used to handouts?
He frowns and sets the time on his watch,
shaking his big bald head
as though I’m stupid.
July in Brishna Kot
Mid-afternoon and the sun presses down
against the back of my neck like one brick baking.
Mountains waver in the distance. The city flexes and folds.
From my place at the guard post I see the cemetery,
its belt of green flags bristling, standing on end
among a million stones.
Motionless, except for one boy alone, walking home.
The sky is a sheath born hot. It collects the sweat
inside my helmet and gloves, along the inside of my legs –
the hot chafe, the salt stick of feeling like I just wet myself
is ever present.
This part of Kandahar is a hot moon.
A place where the dust goes up with each footfall
and every cleft in the rock becomes somewhere to escape the sun.
The markets are shuttered. The shops have all shut their eyes.
White is the only wise colour now.
Across the city, unexploded ordinance winds up like a ricochet,