War Poem
There was no achievement
In | the airfield |. The airfield was
Our wedding. No, it was our house
Become our | plane |.
I collected the intensifiers of lightning
And | circled | them around me.
I named my seven sons
And then blew up their phones.
The baby has learned the language of desire
And what it means | to possess |. For outside
He says | my outside |. For down, he says
My down. Not inside, but outside. No. No.
| No |. The baby has learned the language of mirrors.
Self-reflected, re-embodied, and un-hinged.
What does | a baby | look like to a baby?
Hot and dark. Hot and dark.
Apple as | an apple | as an apple as a substance.
Say night night to this one.
Say night night to everyone.
Say goodbye to whoever is not in the room.
Copyright © 2026 by Sara Deniz Akant. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 26, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets.
“I can’t separate the ordinary language of my life from the violence of America. This poem began as a collage of disparate sources: an OULIPO translation experiment, a dream in which I bombed my family, [and] phrases we kept repeating around the house. I was also fascinated by the way my toddler was developing speech, and wanted to write about how we learn what it is to desire or possess. When I shared a draft in a workshop, and someone said they read it as a ‘war poem,’ everything clicked. I became fixated on the smoothing over a word like war performs—how it acts as cover for grief, genocide, capitalism, carnage. Language can be a form of imprisonment; euphemisms are often untraceable. They become the poem, then they become you.”
—Sara Deniz Akant
Sara Deniz Akant
Sara Deniz Akant is the author of Hyperphantasia (Rescue Press, 2022); Babette (Rescue Press, 2015); and Parades (Omnidawn, 2014).
A professor of the practice in English at Tufts University, Akant lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.