leila farjami

Motherland

Your name is the darkness
amidst which extinguished stars
are scattered.

Unremitting and firm,
some lost eastern sparrows
carried you on their wings
millions of light-years
to this desolate earth.

You are a moon,
drowning in its silvery lava.

Your name
is the prayer of grieving mothers
whispered at dawn
years after the war’s end,

and the breath inside
the sigh of a capsized refugee raft,
the sigh of grief after a beloved’s corpse
is lowered into the grave,
the sigh of endless solitary years
spun over our mouths—
a web through which
no sound could escape.

You bury your face
under the march
of decrepit army boots
and an eternal blanket
of tar and bones.

Should you return,
no one will recognize you;
no one will greet you at the door.

No one wants to sit
across the dinner table
from a murderer.