Moon at Half Past Noon

My name is Qasim. I am eleven years old.
I walk with the strangers, in the long, serpent-tail caravan.
My feet are two stones, wrapped in skin.
I lost one shoe to the mud that drinks everything.
The other one clicks, like a tired tongue.

This is what the world looks like, I think.
A road of ground teeth, leading to more broken teeth.
The houses are not houses anymore.
They are open mouths, full of blackness.
They are skeletons after the feast of the fire-birds.
Ummi said the world was green and full of songs.
But the sky is the color of sickness, and the only song
is the shuffle of a thousand feet, a dry river flowing backwards.

In the caravan, we are a new kind of creature.
Many bodies, one shadow. Our breath is a cloud of dust and tiredness.
A man carries a door on his back. Why a door?
There is no house to put it in. A woman’s arms are empty,
so she holds them crossed, tight, like a cage for a ghost.
I see a doll, half-buried, one glass eye staring at the sun.
I do not look for its other half. I already know.

The world smells of burned wire, of things that should not be cooked.
And underneath, the old smell of dust, the only thing that remains.
A million cuts were drawn across my motherland,
and I am walking on the scabs. Each step is a whisper:
This is normal. This is what is. This is the world.

When we stop, I drink water from a plastic bottle warm as blood.
I look back at the serpent-tail of us, winding through the broken land.
We are the people of the hollow places now. Our home is the walking.
Our city is the long, slow cut, being drawn deeper and deeper,
a million times, into my soul.

And yesterday, I saw a bird with a broken wing,
beating against the stones. I knew I should feel sad.
I knew I should try to help.
But I just watched.
And I felt nothing at all.
That is when I knew the war had taken
the last thing it had not yet broken.
It had finished its work on me.