Sandwich
I wanted to go to the qabarstan with a sandwich and have a picnic.
How people do.
Instead of just going and saying prayers.
But it rained hard and I had to run for the car.
Why do people run for the car? What do we think is going to happen?
It is not as if we are going to die.
We are all going to die.
When I go to the qabarstan I always lose my place and can’t find the grave.
For the briefest of uncanny moments it feels like you are not dead.
You are not dead.
Copyright © 2026 by Kazim Ali. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 25, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets.
“Qabarstan is the Urdu word for a cemetery or graveyard. Muslim rituals for mourning are somewhat graver than those of the Mexican Day of the Dead, whose forms and practices are more akin to my ways of thinking. But the weather of Buffalo, where my mother rests, is not as amenable to daylong lingering. What is a human supposed to do when confronted with the death of a loved one? How can you possibly understand it? And what is dead anyway? Fanny Howe wrote ‘d--d’ and ‘d--th’ the way that Jewish people write ‘G-d,’ because there was something in death that could or should not be known, or maybe even that wasn’t real. What is a human supposed to do with the unfathomable? Perhaps make a sandwich.”
—Kazim Ali
Kazim Ali
