The sky that remembers the dead

I woke to the sound of the sky being rent, like a curtain too heavy to mend.

My pillow was dust and my blanket was fear, as I prayed for the nightmare to end.

The world was a cacophony of explosions and smoke; the walls knew my heartbeat by name.

I counted the seconds between every thud, but the counting was never a game.

 

My mother would hum through the thunder at night; her spirit was too broken for song,

She’d hold us close as we tried to sleep, whispering, “Child, the night won’t be long.”

But nights became abysses that swallowed our hope, and the stars never asked where we’d gone,

They watched from above as our laughter went out, like a candle denied of its dawn.

 

I drew with a stick in the rubble of streets, sketching dreams I could no longer speak,

A house with a roof, a cat on the step, and a future once bright, now bleak.

I coloured the windows with memory’s dust, though the wind kept on stealing the hue,

For even the crayons had melted from heat, and the sky had hidden its blue.

 

Once there were kites that would dance on the roofs, like bright prayers set free to the sun,

Their tails were of ribbon, their flight was of joy, as childhood was meant to be fun.

But now every whirr that rose in the wind made the elders grow fearful and quail,

For those sounds were not wings, but mortar shells beginning their merciless hail.

 

My brother would whisper, “We’ll leave here one day,” as he drew a boat in the sand,

But the blockade had locked its arms round the shore, forbidding escape from this land.

The gulls no longer circled our bread; they had flown where the silence was kind,

And we learned that survival was more torturous than death, and that despair was all we would find.

 

At night we would speak with the language of eyes, for our voices might bring raids from the air,

We listened for boots on the staircase below, and prayed none would climb up the stair.

My toys were small pebbles; my comfort was hands, all trembling like wind on a reed,

And I thought if I wished hard enough, I could make the world notice our need.

 

The markets were ghosts made of wreckage and of ash, where the fruit wore a veil made of flies,

The bread was a rumour, the water was rationed, the sky was a theatre of lies.

Yet even in hunger, my mother would smile, and divide what she didn’t possess,

For kindness, she said, was the one precious thing they could never destroy or suppress.

 

One dawn I awoke to a silence so deep it could bury a prayer in its skin,

I thought it was peace, till I tasted the blood that was gathering warm on my chin.

Our home was a question the world wouldn’t hear, a riddle that grief couldn’t solve,

And time was a shadow that looped on itself, too weary to ever evolve.

 

I found her that morning still clutching my arm, in the curl of her motionless hand,

The air was too acrid to speak or to scream, yet somehow, I could still understand.

I lay beside her and traced every line that the years had refused to erase,

And whispered the lullaby back to her lips, the one about mercy and grace.

 

The neighbours would say that the sun still returns, though it rises on rubble and bone,

That flowers can bloom in the cracks of despair, if the soil remembers its own.

But I’ve seen the sun hesitate at the edge, too ashamed to look down anymore,

And I’ve heard the earth wail like a mother bereaved, who can’t find the child she bore.

 

Now I am the echo of all that was lost, just a memory inside someone’s dream.

I speak through the dust so the world might recall how silence became the child’s scream.

If you see a kite tangled high in the wires, with a tail made of torn, faded thread,

Please know that it carries all that we were, and all that the silence has said.

 

For one day, perhaps, when the heavens grow tired of falling apart overhead,

The kites will come home, and the laughter will too, to the sky that remembers the dead.