“The Children of Aleppo”, a new poem.

On the suggestion and advice of friends and readers of this blog, I submitted “The Children of Aleppo” to the New Yorker  today.  With some revisions.

We’ll see if they bite.

Lady Nyo

—

The Children of Aleppo

 –

There is no childhood in Aleppo.

There are little martyrs-in-the-making

Where 5 year olds and 8 year olds

Wish for a ‘family death’

Where they can die together

With their parents

Where they live in peace in Heaven

Never tasting the fruits of peace on Earth.

– 

There is no childhood in Aleppo.

The children haunt the abandoned  dwellings

Of friends who have fled the city,

Where they find abandoned teddy bears

While looking for guns for the rebels, their fathers.

– 

“Oh, the poor thing!”

A dead canary in his cage

Abandoned by  owners

They flee the rockets, bombs

And mortars.

In the face of daily death

The sight of this bird

Evokes a child’s sentiment.

But the gunfire outside

(They are used to the noise)

Makes them huddle in the pockmarked

Halls until safe to scatter.

– 

The children of Aleppo

 have no teachers, doctors.

These have fled the cities, schools

But they still pine for ice cream,

For music in the streets,

For curtains not shredded by gunfire

For books and toys

And gardens and flowers,

For friends that have  died

Innocent blood splattering

The dirty cobble stones

At their feet.

– 

The children of Aleppo

Are free and children again

Only in their dreams,

And perhaps, if you believe so,

After death.

– 

How do you put back the brains

Of a child in the cup of a shattered skull?

How do you soothe the howls of the mothers

The groans of the fathers?

How do you comfort the left-alive siblings?

– 

The children of Aleppo

Have no future as children.

Suffer the little children here,

They are the sacrifice of parents

And factions,

And politicians

and war

All with the blood of

10,000 children

Who have died 

In a country torn

By immeasurable violence.

– 

The beautiful children of Aleppo

Like children everywhere

Still want to chase each other

In the gardens, on playgrounds,

Want to dance in the streets,

Want to pluck flowers for their mothers

And they still pine for ice cream.

– 

Jane Kohut-Bartels

Copyrighted, 2014

Tags: "The Children of Aleppo", 000 children of Syria have already died, 10, a new poem, dversepoets.com, Jane Kohut-Bartels, Lady Nyo, Rebels, sacrifice of the innocents, Syria, The New Yorker magazine, war in Syria