From My Memory to Her Heart
My country has a telephone number,
it starts with a K and ends with grief.
The peaceful soldiers stay on guard by the gates
of the telephone exchange,
not a heartbeat escapes their curfew.
They check the identity cards
and love letters,
written when the phone lines
have been drowned
in the static of marching jackboots.
While waiting,
I wrote out of a fading memory:
soldiers built papier-mâché coffins
of applewood, that smelled of orchards
and fumes of gunpowder.
While waiting,
I wrote out of a fading memory:
ambulances carried turquoise jars
of “missed calls”
their number plates read JK01-K-GENOCIDE.
I wrote out of a fading memory:
poems with no meanings
captioned on the walls of army camps
with torn flesh and broken bones.
Not a heartbeat escapes the curfew,
the envelopes stuck in the grooves
of barbed wire;
from my memory to her heart
her mail remains guarded by the peaceful soldiers.
