Today's poem is by Rooja Mohassessy

War of the Cities
       

It's 1983. Flowers smell of salt
and ashes and War of the Cities is intent
on shaking us like dust off the face
of the map, burying us where we hunch
at the kitchen table over tomorrow's schoolwork,
my sister worried the trembling
flame of the oil lamp could give us away.

We wear our day clothes to bed
like soldiers, lie semi-propped up, a flashlight
sinks into Leyla's pillow like a doll, deaf
and dumb, our parents move blindly
about the house, what senses they have,
honed, the sky overhead resigned. Starless.

In the small hours—I daydream
of heaven—Mamman, Baba with Leyla,
my palm in Madar's, we rise
out of an immaculate ruin, against a backdrop
of hellfire, flanked on both sides
by fallen martyrs, their blood scabbed into fields
of poetic poppies that die
at the vanishing point. I run ahead and call capriciously,

                                        Mamman!

She swivels for me like a sunflower, my mute father
whispers into her ear something in passing, something
unassuming yet his voice catches
on a Caspian sea breeze and carries.

The siren means we have four minutes
to spare. I have learned to hear past
the insistent holler. I listen for the seething
stealth that precedes the blast, for the hiss
of a viper close to release of venom.

On his run the bomber favors
densely populated quarters and hospitals.
But why, I wonder, does he always arrive
after dark?

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Copyright © 2023 Rooja Mohassessy All rights reserved
from When Your Sky Runs Into Mine
Elixir Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission