Words and Swords
The days of dreamless sleep were long over,
Gone were the times when she would be awakened by the church bells tolling,
She missed the tinkles of the bubbling laughters and grandma's old fairytales,
But mostly, she missed something her poor, withered heart never had - the whispered kisses of her lover’s warm mouth;
She often wondered if this indeed is a never-ending nightmare or her cruel reality,
The deafening silence around her pierced by sudden cries of bloody deaths,
The chilly night winds waking up her shivering form with its unwelcomed presence,
The stale air now reminding her of all the bloodshed and the lives that were forever lost;
One after the other, the gunshots rang in her ears - she had lost count,
As she sat in a corner, clutching on to her numb knees for dear life,
She yearned for the love - the all consuming passion, that would set her ablaze,
Burning in the cold flames of her eternal loneliness;
She stared through time - through the ever-changing seasons,
She stared as the clear blue sky turned into a crimson emptiness,
She stared long after the rain had drowned the endless rows of burning pyres,
She stared till she could no longer see.
She still remembered it like it was yesterday,
When her father gave her that feather pen,
Picking her up, he cradled her close to his bosom,
“This is your weapons, Grace”, he had whispered into her ears, “Use it wisely”;
She couldn’t fathom it then,
How utterly powerful a pen could be.
How a few words on a paper could be the only reason she was willing to breathe everyday still,
How the dark blue of the ink would be the only escape from all the red that had shed from her loved ones;
Her mind wondering off to faraway lands now,
Where the ovens were still hot and smoke still frothed out of the chimneys,
Where children still ran behind each other - not crawling the streets for a crumb of bread,
A land where Grace was the wind, the waves, the rain - where she was boundless, limitless and immortal through her words;
She had lived vicariously through the world she had woven out of longing and imagination,
There were no gunshots there, no parting glances, no orphaned daughters and no broken feather pens,
People there counted their cattle not casualties, men shouting the prices of the garments not orders to open gunfire - Graces’s heart belonged there,
Amongst laughter, light and the fresh smell of cakes - instead of wailings, darkness and the stench of irreparable losses.
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