‘My Homeland’: A Poet’s Quest to Help a Family Flee Afghanistan

Zohra Saed, who teaches at the City University of New York, has rallied the literary community to help another poet and his family get to safety.

Zohra Saed was an infant when her family, ethnic Uzbeks, fled Afghanistan because of the Soviet-Afghan war, a conflict that killed many of her relatives. But she absorbed her parents’ stories as she grew up in Brooklyn, using them as she became a poet and editor who preserves the literature of Afghan writers.

Three years ago, Ms. Saed, a professor at the City University of New York, began working with a writer from northern Afghanistan to preserve and publish lyrical folk poems in the Uzbek language.

She translated many into English, including this one — simply titled “Afghanistan.”