This week's Poetry Pairing matches "Hip-Hop Ghazal" by Patricia Smith with "Why Afghan Women Risk Death to Write Poetry," an article about a women's literary society based in Kabul. After reading the poem and article, tell us what you think - or suggest other Times content that could be matched with the poem instead. Patricia Smith is the author of Blood Dazzler (2008), which considered the human and environmental cost of Hurricane Katrina and was nominated for a National Book Award. She's also been a featured poet on HBO's Def Poetry Jam. In "Hip-Hop Ghazal," Smith takes what was originally an Arabic verse form and makes it her own. - Poetry Foundation In "Hip-Hop Ghazal," Smith takes what was originally an Arabic verse form and makes it her own. Hip-Hop Ghazal By Patricia Smith Gotta love us brown girls, munching on fat, swinging blue hips, decked out in shells and splashes, Lawdie, bringing them woo hips. As the jukebox teases, watch my sistas throat the heartbreak, inhaling bassline, cracking backbone and singing thru hips. Like something boneless, we glide silent, seeping 'tween floorboards, wrapping around the hims, and ooh wee, clinging like glue hips. Engines grinding, rotating, smokin', gotta pull back some. Natural minds are lost at the mere sight of ringing true hips. Gotta love us girls, just struttin' down Manhattan streets killing the menfolk with a dose of that stinging view. Hips. Crying 'bout getting old-Patricia, you need to get up off what God gave you. Say a prayer and start slinging. Cue hips. In the article "Why Afghan Women Risk Death to Write Poetry," Eliza Griswold writes: Mirman Baheer, Afghanistan's largest women's literary society, is a contemporary version of a Taliban-era literary network known as the Golden Needle. In Herat, women, pretending to sew, gathered to talk about literature. In Kabul, Mirman Baheer has no need for subterfuge. Its more than 100 members are drawn primarily from the Afghan elite: professors, parliamentarians, journalists and scholars. They travel on city buses to their Saturday meetings, their faces uncovered, wearing high-heeled boots and shearling coats. But in the outlying provinces - Khost, Paktia, Maidan Wardak, Kunduz, Kandahar, Herat and Farah - where the society's members number 300, Mirman Baheer functions largely in secret. Of Afghanistan's 15 million women, roughly 8 out of 10 live outside urban areas, where U.S. efforts to promote women's rights have met with little success. Only 5 out of 100 graduate from high school, and most are married by age 16, 3 out of 4 in forced marriages. Young poets like Meena who call into the hot line, Amail told me, "are in a very dangerous position. They're behind high walls, under the strong control of men. Herat University's celebrated young poet, Nadia Anjuman, died in 2005, after a severe beating by her husband. She was 25. Pashtun poetry has long been a form of rebellion for Afghan women, belying the notion that they are submissive or defeated. Landai means "short, poisonous snake" in Pashto, a language spoken on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. The word also refers to two-line folk poems that can be just as lethal. Funny, sexy, raging, tragic, landai are safe because they are collective. No single person writes a landai; a woman repeats one, shares one. It is hers and not hers. Although men do recite them, almost all are cast in the voices of women. "Landai belong to women," Safia Siddiqi, a renowned Pashtun poet and former Afghan parliamentarian, said. In Afghanistan, poetry is the women's movement from the inside. "A poem is a sword," Saheera Sharif, Mirman Baheer's founder, said. Sharif is not a poet but a member of Parliament from the province of Khost. Literature, she says, is a more effective battle for women's rights than shouting at political rallies. This is a different kind of struggle. After reading the poem and the article, tell us what you think - or suggest other Times content that could be matched with the poem instead. See more about the collaboration and ideas for using any week's pairing for teaching and learning  Patricia Smith's "Hip-Hop Ghazal" is from Poetry (July/August 2007).