Crimson Army

(dedicated to all of my spiritual sisters worldwide)

Did you know that Jesus has hands?

Though holey palms bear witness of our sins

(And still they cup new seeds)

Though holy, only-begotten, Papa's right-hand man

(And still they humble themselves
 that those seeds may take root)

Though wholly existing without the womb of a woman

(And still solely able to paint our fields blood red).

Is the color of a battleground 

That against all odds yields a crimson camellia army.

Her faith reach the root shoot up to the stigma,

(It is here the bees meet their match

Smothered in wax, now ready to be reborn.)

"She is clothed with strength and splendor";

Every petal and peduncle breathing testimony to this truth.

The weeds, the shovel, the creeping weevil and the hoe

All conspiring to kill

All aspiring to know:

Who would win the war,

The bomb or the bud?
Well, it's the camellia, of course.
And what's more,

The middlemist red shoots her pistil into the sky.

ABOUT: The Middlemist Red Camellia. "Surviving the twists and turns of history, climates of different continents and even bombings, these meaningful rarest camellias can definitely serve as a vivid lesson for the human race." -Arena Flowers India

Proverbs 31

Syria, My Beloved

One

There is this kid,

Maybe he's six,

Maybe he just embodies what a six-year-old

Is supposed to look like,

The point is-

He is the kind of small that could crawl into a 

Cougar's den without getting caught.

Yet, not small enough to escape the 

The manchild's draft.

Two

Draft

(Noun)

A current of cool air moving in a closed space

Three 

A current of boy army, of toy soldier, breeze in to

Enclose Damascus.

Four 

The bowels of his mother turn

(A ghost-womb belly kick

At the flashflood of her baby boy's face)

Churn into wanting,

Then rumble into waste.

At last she has emptied herself of him.

Five

Who

Really 

Is

More 

Death

Than

A

Woman 

Bereft?

Six

The soft skin inside his elbow

Is tickled by a

Smooth, round bomb:

The corner of his lips crinkle

Upward at the "touch" of her

"Fingertips".

Seven

From miles across Aleppo's rubble,

The child and his bomb

Could be confused for a 

Mother cradling her suckling infant

Until he falls asleep full of milk,

Pool of it dribbling down his chin.

Eight

There are two types of hunger:

The kind you can kill 

Or the kind that kills you.

Nine:

And so they salvage their own city,

Bullying milk from a thin bovine's breasts,

Desperate cannibal feeding off his own flesh.

The streets reek of hurt and desolation.

Ten:

Scrawny-man-with-big-anger-

But-her-little-boy's-eyes bumps her at the market.

He turns in her stomach

Yanks back her breath.

Death is a living thing

She calls it by his name.

ABOUT// A Syrian boy soldier and his mother

Isaiah 2:4- He will render judgment among the nations and set matters straight respecting many peoples. They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning shears. Nation will not lift up sword against nation, nor will they learn war anymore.