Reading Celan in Dearborn, Michigan – Hajjar Baban

I had no one to choose and lived within the rocks.

My mother called herself an orphan after
her father had no longer, in their home, appeared. Though literally through war,
the same story seems to fill in me. The language I didn’t learn
because of what my father’s father made, caused disappearance,
because there’s a clock that for us no one wants
to move. That for us, created
the word sparse.

Hajjar Baban

Hajjar Baban is a Pakistan-born Afghan Kurdish poet. A 2021 PD Soros Fellow, she is working toward an MFA in Poetry at the University of Virginia.

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