(For civilians everywhere who carry the weight of wars they never chose.)
When bombs fall,
the architects of war draw careful lines on trembling maps
and call it strategy,
as if the earth were a chessboard
and cities were only silent pawns.
But beneath those maps,
in homes stitched together by breath and hope,
the night shatters like a dropped mirror,
each shard reflecting
a mother’s whispered prayer,
a father standing guard over fragile dreams,
a child’s unfinished tomorrow.
The sky becomes a wounded drum
beating thunder over sleeping roofs,
and every explosion
is a fist knocking
on the fragile door of peace.
And somewhere, always somewhere,
a cup of tea grows cold beside a window,
a book closes mid-sentence,
and a lullaby dissolves
into the smoke of unanswered questions.
To those who command from distant rooms,
war is a diagram,
a storm reduced to numbers,
a language spoken fluently by power
and translated painfully by the poor.
But to the people beneath its shadow
it is a garden trampled by iron footsteps,
a river learning the taste of salt from tears,
a father hiding his fear behind quiet courage,
another night
where sleep hides like a frightened bird.
And the moon,
that quiet archivist of human sorrow,
hangs above the burning sky
like an old storyteller
turning the same weary page of history,
wondering why the same tragedy
is written again and again
in the fragile ink of human lives.
For wars may be drawn on maps,
but their echoes live in kitchens,
their shadows sleep in children’s eyes,
and their deepest wounds
are written in homes.
-Dr Haroon Rashid
