It’s National Poetry Day 2022, and You Cannot Expect Me to Write About Anything Else

These days I scream silently into the earth and

beg to have my sanity returned.

Don’t gift me a new breed of despair, I tell her.

Don’t offer me a such a vast variety of heartache.

Don’t offer me anything.

Of course, we want to believe that crushing skulls won’t crush souls

but I’m not thinking of the dead here.

They have fought their battles; they have moved on.

They don’t live here daily haunted by the face of humanity.

Oh! look, the sun sets again in colours of blood and plasma.

They say the sky is on fire. They say so was she.

Look how the clouds make faces of the recently deceased.

Look how the skies darken into obsidian, just like her hair.

For my Afghan and Iranian sisters

Shikha S. Lamba