Ohh Mother, oh dear mother…
Where are you…
Did Abu bring the chart papers for my project..? Does my sister still steal my rosy robes..? Does your Musakhan taste as delicious as before..? Ohh mother , how I crave,
for a fleeting moment to grasp that aroma..!
I was at school, mother,
Of course you know, you packed my steel lunch box, My math class, oh how I used to despise, those lessons and theorems…
But now, I realize, how the rugged side
of my teacher’s wooden ruler felt,
when I forgot to learn those trivial equations, was indeed a silky smoothening…
How I used to mock these,
Oh but now…
Then there was a deafening sound…
I heard a shriek…
whose voice was that..?
I could not grasp…
Was it Aisha?
Was it Fathima?
Or was it me?
I felt a pool of coolness around me,
as I slipped into profound slumber…
In the warmth of that chillness,
I dreamt of you, my amm…
I dreamt of your loose robes,
embroidered with white roses,
and your pristine headdress…
But in my dream the roses turned red…
Your lucid image became obscure…
Then at once, came a dark figure…
She soothed my disheveled hair with her scrawny fingers… Mused a lullaby in an unknown tongue…
A language I didn’t get time to learn…
My time, stolen away from me by those black hands…
My time, to learn about all those mystifying animals,
those onerous lessons about Newton’s laws…
Chanted over and again…
Yet the word inertia, slipping out of my memory…
like my brief life out of my shell did.
Promptly, the limbs of the lady started to grow…
Two gigantic horns sprouted out of her temple…
As I lay there, trying to thrash my long ceased heart to life… Getting ridiculed at my feeble exertions…
Gradually, I started to hear the screeching of hundreds, thousands, millions… The desolation now swarmed with the carcasses that weep…
Ohh where did i go wrong..?
If I promise to study those laws by heart,
Will you liberate me from this torment..?
Wasn’t I supposed to be worried,
about getting questioned about my sweethearts..? Wasn’t I supposed to be afraid,
of forgetting my homework..?
Wasn’t I supposed to be nagged,
for biting my fingernails..?
But why ,why am I, being engulfed by the dread, of finding you among the heap of corpses..? Will I have to sink in despair, when I spot my rosy robes, often stolen by my sister, torn in shreds,
among the strewn flesh..?
Why? Why?
I wonder , how long it takes
before the wailing of the innocents
becomes a lullaby to the world..?
How long before,
the murdered children
Become a diurnal news?
How long will it take,
for schools, hospitals, mosques and churches to become safe grounds..?
How long will it take,
to have a right to live as a child..?
Ohh i wonder,
I wonder , in today’s world, where humanity crumbles, under the resonance of boots and explosions… How it gets vanquished under the rain of bullets… All I can do is pray, but to whom shall I…
Ohh mother, tell me, tell me please…
Before I get consumed by the Div…
All I can muse is…
Ohh sacred heart…
The city of peace…
Or now was it..?
Yet peace never dawned upon its people… Bloodshed and Chaos thrived upon the lands, once praised as the birthplace of the god himself… A paradise now swayed by the devil…
And the people wretched by his impious influence… Where God has been crucified long ago… And now blind folded…
May one day he shall rise again…
And may the land holds its true divinity and Peace…
As the Red Threads Ornate Keffiyeh
