Sharbat Gula
Steve McCurry, 1984

As if broken in upon
By the spirit of God,
She turns to look.

Daughter,
From a psalm of King David.
Happened upon

In a refugee tent
In Nasir Bagh,
In a temporary encampment

In the North-West Frontier Province
Of western Pakistan,
During a breathing spell in war.

A lost flight out of Egypt
Brought to a halt in 1984
At the edge of Peshawar.

A girl the color
Of sawdust shavings
From the cedars of Lebanon,

And a glance, inadvertently granted:
An onslaught of green
In Kodachrome 64.

♦

A glance King David could have seen,
Looking up “at the turn
Of the year, the time when kings

Had gone forth to battle”—
As if, looking up, he had found
The child of a slain Philistine,

Standing no further from him
Than the length of an arrow.
Standing her ground.

♦

Light green sea glass
Washed up on a shore
In Canaan,

The music of Psalm 33,
Unfaded: He hath
Gathered the waters of the sea

Into jars. He layeth up
The ocean depths
In storehouses—

Found, hoarded, traded
Into landlocked Afghanistan
From the treasury of David.

♦

The photographer said
It was a kind of “blue-green-gray”—
The gray tint

Fugitive, tent-lit,
An illusory pane of glass, flash-seen
Then vanishing

Among the steep, dark-green
Quarry walls of a refugee tent.
A shade of gray evolved

As camouflage, far west
Of Nasir Bagh, among the gray peaks
Guarding Persepolis:

A clutch of Persian Eagle eggs
Wind-accosted in a nest
Built on a precipice.

♦

We hope you’ve enjoyed this sampling of Gjertrud Schnackenberg’s long poem. Order the issue in which it appears (NER 38.2), in print or digital formats.

In addition, read Susan Gillis’s interview with Schnackenberg in Concrete & River.