Sitting deeply in grief,
in deep grief and mourning
morning and night.
The knights nowhere
to be seen. Sight
is a witness, complicit.
From minarets and church pits,
we illicit faith. The eve
of Christ’s birth
almost here. Hear the Earth
as it receives the body’s
soft and exposed tissues, the heart
hard as a rock, the rock no longer
figurative. We lost even
the figures of our children. The outline
of a body, jagged front line,
bulldozed memory. Our eyes open
to the mouth of a weapon.
Someone, somewhere, is playing
the violin in the background
of violence.
Before all of this, we didn’t think
too often of heaven. We wanted to fly
through clouds, not above them.
Copyright © 2025 by Sara Abou Rashed. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 30, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
