Moon at Half Past Noon

While across distant wires,
a different dawn uncoils—
yellow ribbons falling from ancient trees.
A nation swells with tears
for each soul returned,
we count our missing by the thousands.
Your bittersweet relief for what was found
echoes hollow in our cratered streets,
where we search for what was forever lost.

We saw your celebrations,
your back-thumping parades.
A victory built from our bedrooms,
our bakeries, our blood.
You raised a flag on the grave of our horizon,
called it peace, called it order.
We call it theft of our sky, a debt of our very earth.

We are the ones who counted days
by absence at the table,
who met every jeep with hope’s thorny vine.
We searched every list,
scanned every returning face,
for a son, a daughter, a father—
a name swallowed by your night.
You speak of prisoner returns
as a headline, a bargain struck.
For us, it is a breath held for years,
finally a sob—or nothing at all.

And you, the men in pressed suits,
who now walk our dust,
shaking hands stained with our light,
you call it “trust.”

You pose for cameras amid our rubble,
your smiles sharpened knives.
Then thump your own backs
with winners on their streets,
praising the “hard peace”
that preserves your lives.
You are harbingers of nothing
but your own reflection,
polishing your medals
in the sheen of our destruction.

You, who became spectators in our tragedy,
who gasped as our homes were blown to smithereens—
know that we are those smithereens.
We are the particulate of memory,
the dust of a thousand prayers.
The unanswered question,
the unresolved chord of pain.

And our soldiers, our mothers, our broken ones return—
do not call them heroes to their ashen faces.
They come back from the field,
from the hiding places,
leaving only dust and carrion birds behind.
They carried your flags, your orders,
your grand, whispered lies,
and now carry the hollow
weight of duties done, or evils suffered.
Their victory is a taste of ash.
Their honor: a fresh, unhealing wound.
They traded humanity, their innocence,
for a world they cannot un-make.

So when you ask why
we do not join your calm,
why we refuse to forget,
remember: you celebrate our ruins.
Your silence was the mortar,
your spectating the seal.
This new world
you’ve saved has no place for us—
only the dead you pretend not to see,
dancing in these hollow places,
teaching us the final lesson:
how to un-belong.

Yet, if you must witness
our survival, come see what grows in the shadow:
not joyous banners, but defiant rest;
not parades, but the breath
still drawn where every hearth won’t burn.
We celebrare a flickering lamp
against the endless night,
the silent pact to simply exist.
We honor the ghosts of fading light,
the names we call, refusing to be missed.
This quiet strength that rises from the dust,
this stubborn root that claws through broken stone—
this grim survival, born of fierce distrust,
is our testament: that even shattered, we are known.