Cry, My Beloved Land

In those days, Hafiz Mansoor writes, history was dated by what the natural world did. A great earthquake, a cattle plague, a flood, a drought, or a quarrel between two villages or two tribes — any of these would serve as the point from which people counted. On the day of his mother's wedding the locusts came in numbers nobody had seen, and so his parents were married in the year of the locust. Plants coming up, trees in blossom, the call of migrating birds: each carried its message about the season, and people read the year off them exactly. Text in Dari/Persian.

Author: حفیظ منصور

Original title: گریه کن سرزمین محبوب من