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A Week After Zia Died


 
I knelt beside an empty bedside
A week after Zia died
It was not his death that I mourned
I wept for ours.

It was here
That I intoned secrets
To tape-recorded blaring
of Begum Akhtar’s sighs,
to beat the prying ears
Of Zia’s spies.

It was here
That we first saw snowdrops in May,
And you murmured your suppressed wonder
that we had at last arrived
But then we left facing east
A week after Zia died.

"Neckless" as Benazir said,
So he could not face West,
When we left
A week after Zia died.

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