Bellum

Bellum.
When the war came for us,
we locked the remnants of our dreams inside our gap tooth
& sprinted for fear that it would swallow us like it did our homes.

When the war walked into our city during the sky’s siesta,
we thrashed a mother’s lips with these cracked feets,
in search of the borders our ancestors never crossed.

When the war threatened to drown our eyes with massacres,
We cupped our fears in one palm
and hosted a gathering of broken skulls in the other.

When the war stretched itself towards the skin of our hearth,
it shaped her into a bullet hungry for bodies.
A sanctuary for warm blood and carnaged limbs.

When the war found a home in between the thighs of our abode,
it nested there until she became a barren woman,
inept of conceiving safety for her own progenies.

And when the war comes for us again,
compelling home to eat up the same children she bore,
we would crawl into each other and make a haven out of ourselves.