The Creative Process: The Arts of War (Spring 2017)

Spring 2017
The Arts of War
My hands still quivering from the taste of cold metal clasped in my
palms
A pull of a trigger and the gunshot still makes me shiver.
And now the desolated darkness shrouds the cities
With a haunting calm and melting candles on every front door
That can’t illuminate the houses as brightly as they used to before.
The ghosts of all those wanted the war now haunts the city
The blooming city,
With her children so tender and the rivers that helped,
Now howls every night from the loss of her own blood.
And the sky remains silent. As the sky always does. Observing the
rubble.
Can the rain wash away the handprints of the martyrs who collapsed
against the soil in their last breaths and grabbed a fistful of the earth,
desperately pleading for it to embrace them the way their mothers
would have?
I can feel it all again when the nightmares turn into my heaving
chest, into a landfill of devastated dreams, into empty promises of
freedom.
Their bruised hands tried so hard to hold the country together
That it broke their hearts when everything fell apart
And they couldn't save all the children.
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