Stars of Stone

Going through some folders of old poetry, looking to find salvageable lines from binned poems, and thinking about how Afghanistan, Islam, and the murderous barbarism of ‘honour killings’ have been constantly in the news over the past few months (and years, especially since 2003), I thought I’d put up ‘Stars of Stone’, a poem drafted in 1996 after I had read a report of an honour killing in Afghanistan: