When he was first imprisoned in the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, poet Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost was deprived of writing materials and so “memorized his best lines or scribbled them secretly on paper cups.” He was subsequently given pen and paper and wrote “reams” of poems — “only to have all but a few of the documents confiscated by the U.S. government upon his release,” as a Washington Post story by N.C. Aizenmann reports. Finally freed and back home in Peshawar, Pakistan, with his wife and eight children, he asks, “Why did they give me a pen and paper if they were planning to do that? Each word was like a child to me — irreplaceable.”