Dear Child Of War
Dear child of war,
dust-wearing-wind carries a feeble cry 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 sky splitting missiles 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, thoracic fingers squeeze your soul.
Heart, a hostage, flutters like a lost moth against 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
grown on rocket-torn-boot-worn streets.
War-zone fig trees bear no fruit,
hibiscus bud dies as hornets knit nests into shrub,
tomorrow but a diseased 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
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