WHAT DO YOU WANT ME TO TELL YOU ABOUT WAR?

Is it the way men die, the way their wives

trace their corpses with candlelight? Is it how
bombs sound when they hit those boys?
Is it the way people fall whenever bullets
sail like water in their hearts, in their veins?
Is it how we are all going to die, how we do
not know if there is going to be another way,
how we do not know the faces covered with dust?

 

 

 

Is it the way it leaves us broken, shattered?

Is it the way we carry our beloveds’ pictures in
our pockets, the way we mourn them everyday,
remembering the time spent together, the time spent
tracing the circumference of a world that breaks,
that slips, that flees? Is it the way we sing an elegy
for infants caught in the fire, the way we remember
Nigeria, Iraq, Syria?

 

 
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rasaq Malik is a graduate of the University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Nigeria. His poems have appeared in Connotation Press, Heart Online Journal, Jalada, Saraba, Sentinel, African Writers, New Black Magazine, Kalahari Review, and elsewhere. He believes writing is an act of healing, an art that transcends the world, that survives every death.
 

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