pictured words

A Syrian friend
flees the supper table with
her whole family

leaving home-cooked meal
to decay in silence, as  
bombs scream her story.

While bombs shake her house
in Ukraine, a sweet young child
runs out the front door,

glares at a gutless
foe, shakes her fist, and bellows,
“You cannot scare me!”

A gentle woman
from Afghanistan stumbles
as she tries to bolt

away from the bombs
in her path. She breaks her nose.
But her lungs still breathe.

More friends from Ukraine
had no light, no heat for months.
This, in my friend’s words:
 
“Life is divided
into before and after
war came to our house.”

In shadows, evil
slinks across the globe beneath
our sentinel moon.

© Marie Elena Good, 2024

These are just a few of the stories of war-weary refugee friends of mine. These few don’t express but an infinitesimal spec of the havoc war wreaked on our planet in the time it took me to pen this poem. What we humans are willing to do to fellow humans is unspeakably horrific.