The Land That Devours Its Names by: Bissan Edwan
"The blood was not red this time..."
The blood was not red this time.
It was black, like the earth when it drinks its own fire,
gray, like the air after an airstrike.
It was colorless, nameless, bodiless,
as if war had turned into shadows walking alone,
as if those who fell had not fallen,
but melted into the soil and became the wind.
The massacre was not a sound—it was absence,
as if the city had lost its ability to scream,
as if the walls had learned silence from the corpses,
as if even the stones had turned into nameless gravestones.
On the morning of the massacre, there was no morning.
The shadow wandered between the shattered walls,
looking for something to lean on,
and the sun, bombed a thousand times over,
rose like a mark of regret in the sky.
No one was here.
Everyone was here.
Beneath the rubble, above it,
in the hollowed-out walls,
in the mouth of the wind,
chewing their names, then spitting them out as if they never were.
There is no real truce.
Day is postponed, night is postponed, peace is postponed,
only war keeps its appointments,
arriving whenever the graves run scarce.
Here, where the asphalt remembers no footsteps,
a mother walks with three children who are now only names,
dragging them as the moon drags its bleeding tides to shore.
She remembers—
remembers when the earth bore wheat, not bodies,
when the night carried stories, not bombs.
The land is hungry, and still—
it devours its names, its streets, its daylight,
but it never tires of memory,
and it never thirsts enough for blood.
Night fell, but it was not night.
It was embers burning over the survivors’ tents,
it was the sky splitting open like a hellmouth above them,
it was the planes dropping death
as if reaping the city with an iron scythe.
There was no time to weep.
The tents ignited before their owners knew they were gone.
The children burned as they dreamed of a morning that never came.
The mothers stretched out their hands in the dark,
searching for little ones whose voices had vanished before they could cry.
Occupation does not need faces.
It is the planes that hover over the city,
a giant hand wiping it off the map.
It is the bombs that do not distinguish
between an infant and a flute.
It is the fire slipping through the alleys like a serpent,
hunting for the last ones left.
At night, when the shelling receded slightly,
they emerged, searching for each other in the ashes.
The ashes outnumbered the living.
The faces were black, the hands black, the homes black,
and the moon—untouched—
hung white above them, like a ghost too afraid to descend.
At the edge of the street lay the girl who had been killed.
Her braid had not burned.
It remained, telling the earth’s hunger for memory,
dangling from the unseen,
whispering to the war:
"You will not take all of me.
I will leave my shadow here."
In the last corner of the last tent,
they found a charred girl beneath her mother’s chest,
a doll in her hand—
half ash, half waiting.
No one called her name.
No one covered her.
The war was faster than the mother,
faster than the stories,
faster than a scream with no one left to hear it.
No truce.
Massacres leave silence,
silence breeds waiting,
and waiting—
is just war returning once more,
bare except for shattered promises,
bare except for souls that keep walking,
not knowing whether they are still alive
or merely moving,
because war has not yet told them to stop.
From the collectio “The Trap of Reassurance...Narratives of the White Cities”...under publis
