Dear Child Of War
Dear child of war,
dust-wearing-wind carries feeble cries in its palm,
settles it near ears that can no longer hear.
Cries arise from hollows of your hungry face,
a pulpit of high cheeks bones— in sharp relief
to sunken skin-scape sallow and paper thin—
a preacher on the harrows of hunger.
Vulture keeps a still, silent vigil,
a patient witness to your starvation…
comrade and adversary in a fight
for your last breath and beat.
Your loyal companion, a symbol of death
where drones rain with flames on tents of refugees
and missiles split skies and make shrapnel of the sun,
where dragon-fire-artillery shoots the moon
and shreds stars till they fate-fall
like the last nightjars from nocturne skies.
Dear child of war,
alone with nothing in your belly but a stone,
rib bones a famine cage.
Hostage heartbeat condemned behind soul's sternum.
I long to hold you and feed you
honey made of a million wild flowers
uncrushed beneath metal plates of tank treads.
I yearn to bathe you of collapsed concrete dust
cleanse you of your mother’s blood,
rattle-boned, battle-owned, maternal body wrapped
over yours as they fed her Kalashnikov lead.
My faraway ache for your plight pales
against your tiny body’s black-rose-throes,
a pawn to thorns of soldiers
piercing pulses on rocket-torn-boot-worn streets.
War-zone fig trees bear no fruit,
hibiscus buds die as hornets knit nests into shrub,
tomorrow but a wheat field laid to waste.
Dear child of war,
blitz-blind world indifferent to your orphan hunger.
Pallbearer-wind carries your cries (crumbled to dust)
elsewhere… I failed you in your final pangs.
—Eight billion of us
failed you.
Copyright © Susan Ashley | Year Posted 2025
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