We are fighting faceless ghosts.
Our fists fit the image
Of flying rockets
Directed to the unending mist,
To the obscure silence
Seconds after the shock wave of a bomb,
Before you wake up to a world
Screaming over your shoulders
Corpse being carried by corpse to be,
While you lie there,
Voiceless, powerless;
While you lie there,
Realizing that a day’s sweat
Is now mixed with your blood,
And a night’s dream
Is overshadowed by engine steam
Till the image becomes so blurry
You forget why you were working in the first place.
Four people martyred next door-
The neighborhood fell broken,
Four people silenced-
Hundreds have spoken,
Sending their condolences to a country that died
Before it ever lived,
Sending their condolences to cognitive abilities-
To the lack of them,
Sending their condolences to a heart
That was shattered by theory
Before it got shattered by physicality,
To a soul that was lost
In the dark realms of marginalization
And thought of light
As flammable substance;
Sending their condolences to a mother.
A mother of a 16 year old boy,
A mother of a man,
A mother of a woman,
A mother that lost all what’s left of her
In a world
Which once was a heaven
Under her feet,
As she walks
The earth breathed her scent
Until the day the earth became asphalt
And the asphalt was covered with blood;
Until the day our papers got shattered
Our books, torched,
Our thoughts buried
Our mothers worried;
I write this poem
And it might be my last,
All is left of me is paper,
Like water transformed to water vapor-
Droplets of me lingering on the edges
Of the universe,
Until one day I write dense enough
To become rain,
Heavy over our heads
Reviving the grass roots of our thought
Growing flowers
Before wars;
The same flowers we used
To honor our dead.
The same white flowers
They’ll use
To honor us.