It's Still Life

While the Daffodils Open

This is not a poem.
This is a fist.

Again.
Again.
The word itself is a wound that will not close.

Again the rubble breathes its grey prayer.
Again the children sort through stones
for something that was never a mother,
never a bed,
never a name.

I watch daffodils open,
yellow throats tipped toward
the same sun that rises over craters.

Birds build in the hedge,
beaks full of twig and moss,
stitching the air with purpose.
They do not know.
They cannot.
But I know.
I carry the news like a second spine:
bombs falling, bodies falling,
and somewhere a man in a clean room
washes his hands of the math
and calls it victory.

Victory.
The word tastes of ash in the mouth.
What did you win?
A city of shadows?
A silence where children should sing?
You burned the song and kept the silence
and called it peace.

This is not desensitisation.
This is the opposite.
This is feeling too much.
A daffodil and the dust
held in the same impossible gaze.
The nest and the rubble.
The bloom and the blood.

I have no answer

but this:
the wrongs that cannot be set right
must at least be witnessed.
Must at least be held
in the same hands
that hold a daffodil,
that feed the birds,
that tremble with the weight
of holding both at once.

The missiles still fall.
Still kill.
And still—
still—
the daffodils open.

I do not know why.
I only know
we must be the ones
who do not look away.

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This is my comment and response to Spira’s post 3000 Cars. Some images created with Midjourney; all writing is authentically my own original work.©Misky 2006-2026.