Expression of powerful feelings can't be bound by age or time.

Byline: Sadia Qasim Shah

PESHAWAR -- Zeb Yousafzai may be 60-year-old but this Pakhtun poet from Dagai area of Swabi district says that her poetry is in infancy and will grow and mature as she continues to write about different subjects and themes that inspire her.

She told Dawn that she was finding more confidence in expressing her feelings as people were becoming appreciative of women poets and writers.

Ms Yousafzai is a poet and novelist but she is also interested in preserving Pashto culture and language. She has collected some 1,400 Pashto proverbs and a number of eulogies.

Wearing a tradition shawl of Swabi women called Chail, she talked about her poetry and collection of proverbs. She said that it was important to preserve those proverbs as they depicted their cultural values and life.

Ms Yousafzai said that she feared verbal phrases, passed down from one generation to another orally, might vanish with time so she decided to preserve them by writing them down and soon would publish the collection. She said that women used to sing eulogies during weddings in the olden days but the tradition was dying and she wrote down few eulogies too to preserve them for the coming generations.

The poet said that she was very young when she would write down her father's poems for him since he was uneducated. 'My father Abdul Malik Abdul was very good poet and a very kind father, who would listen to my verses too,' she said. He was the first...