Susan Cohen

Beginning with Exile and Ending with Already Flown 

—the Taliban outlaw musical instruments

They fuel bonfires with tablas and harmoniums, exiling sound as smoke and cinder. They ban guitars and ghichaks, tamboors, doyras, the double-chambered lute that’s called a rubab, but not the death rattle. The human voice is that most versatile of instruments. A cry for mercy is an ancient lyric, while a stick striking skin makes a clever drum. These men whose ears still ring with mortar-thud and racketing Kalashnikovs are deaf, but want to pluck the tongues of women and doves. Still, music is craftier than they are—old as echo. Even after death, music remembers how to pick a lock and fling the sky open. It mounts the backs of birds and escapes through air that holds the songs of all who have already flown.

Susan Cohen is the author of three collections, most recently Democracy of Fire (Broadstone; 2022). Her poetry has been published in 32 Poems, Prairie Schooner, Southern Humanities Review, Southern Review, Verse Daily, and won the Red Wheelbarrow Prize, Terrain Annual Poetry Award, and a Special Mention in the Pushcart Prizes. She lives in California.