The wind passes over scorched playgrounds
where laughter once rang like bells,
and now only dust answers the sun.
Children walk barefoot
through the brittle bones of their cities,
eyes like lanterns snuffed out
before the night could teach them dreams.
They do not speak of toys.
Their hands are not meant for holding dolls,
but for carrying water, or
the last fragment of a brother’s photograph.
In the silence that follows a bomb
there is a peculiar sound—
not of sorrow,
but of memory being peeled away
like burnt skin.
The mother sings no lullabies.
Her song is smoke,
her cradle—a crater where once a kitchen stood.
Each child becomes a soldier
not by choice,
but because the sky teaches them
the names of planes and their shadows.
Their drawings are not of trees
but of fences, tanks, and broken men
lying like fallen gods
beneath indifferent stars.
War gives them nothing to inherit
but silence,
and a thirst that no well can quench—
a hunger for the things
that should never have been taken:
a father’s smile,
the scent of rice boiling on a warm stove,
a schoolbook, unopened.
And yet—
somewhere,
beneath the soot-stained fingernails,
a seed of defiance.
A boy teaches his sister
to write her name
in the ash on a wall.
A girl buries a bird
with care, with flowers.
Even in ruin,
they remember tenderness.
They are not angels.
They are not symbols.
They are not the “cost” of war.
They are the poem
that was torn from the page
before it could be read aloud.
They are the truth
no general will speak of,
the question
no answer can kill.
And still they rise—
not like phoenixes,
but like children—
with dirty feet,
quiet voices,
and eyes that ask
why the world is always burning
just before it becomes beautiful.
Broken Author 