Imtiaz Dharker calls herself a Scottish Muslim Calvinist and writes in English. Her No-man’s Land first appeared in her second volume of poetry, Postcards from God.

This poem begins with a stark visual image and a hair-raising auditory one: “A bleak view. A stretch of empty beach” and the screech of seagulls. The place thus evoked is preserved in memory because of what was said and not said between two unidentified interlocutors sitting on the beach who at some earlier point had reached an impasse in their relationship.

The speaker—recalling that the other person had asked, “Is there no way back[?]”—heard “the words for what they [were]: / a half meant signal sent / from no-man’s land . . .” (stanza 2). The speaker remembers feeling that the two of them were (metaphorically) “countries out of reach.”

Here the memory ends, and an associative thought occurs about “Places washed by the sea; / places that men may trample, / stamp across with heavy feet, / batter with their bombs / and bullets, shatter / in staccato sound.” These places, the poet defiantly asserts, “still go free.”

In the final stanza the speaker explains that the trampled and battered places are cleansed eventually by “a rhythm that [men] cannot change,” those natural processes “soothing away [the] furrows / from the forehead of the earth / with a mother’s light relentless hand.”

The poem’s evocation of conflict (and its association with “bleak” environments) and the speaker’s comfort in realizing that time and nature are cleansing and restorative are both buttressed by the poem’s versification. The stanzas are ragged, and lines are unmetered and often end on jarring words (trample, heavy feet, bombs, shatter), but the light-handed rhyming of first lines with final lines in each stanza (beach/screech, sand/land, reach, sea/free, sand/hand) produces a soft repetition of -and sounds at the end that bolster the concluding idea of a “soothing” feminine energy tirelessly at work on the planet.

The poem’s conceit becomes clear, almost physical: parts of the Earth have been made into no-man’s lands, but the Earth is no man’s land.