Here the rocks sweat blood and fire.
The sky
Burnt with the ashes of a million lives
A million loves
Has forgotten how to grieve.
Here lovers walked not long ago
Now their bones lie shattered
Mixed in the shattered ground.
In the ruins of broken statues
In the ruins of broken homes
The smell of death in the air
You measure time -
The slow death of a city -
From the moment that the first bomb fell
In the name of shock and awe.
The man who dropped them is now a hero
To those who cursed his name then.
The city is now dead at last
A broken corpse under the starving sky.
Look. Here, under the tumbled ruin of this wall
Half-covered in the tattered flag of black
Lies the boy,
In his sand yellow uniform
Clutching still
The gun too big for his little hands.
Left to kill and to die.
Somewhere not far away
His victim, father, brother, husband, son
Or his killer. It hardly matters, when the world
Lies frozen around the obtuse flash
Of a busting bomb.
Even the stones are burnt.
They will not be unburnt
Again.
© B Purkayastha 2017
