Alma.of Sarajevo.

The most beautiful smile in the world-
The smile of a pregnant woman,
Shy, ecstatic, playful;
The roses pressed to her heart
Bereft of thorns.

She has almost forgiven the soldier who killed her brother,
Almost, but not entirely.
The ruins concealing snipers are now just ruins;
Wild flowers have sprung up under the broken walls.
She stoops in silence, displaying a simple formality,
And lays the roses gently upon his tomb.

Concealed in darkness
Her unborn infant
turns and kicks
with abrupt power.
The mother stares half blind at ice white grave stones
And grabs her stomach to kill the sudden pain.
Her cry makes desolate the quiet spaces.

 Visceral terror swiftly subsides
But carves a wound that will for all time scar her
Deep, unyielding.
The memory of the day that she was shot
And clubbed with rifle butts by rebel soldiers
Is, strangely, somehow easier to live with
Than these ferocious seconds of foetal pain.

It is now ten years since the fighting ceased.
Hugging her pregnant belly
She turns to leave the hillside cemetery
And begins the long slow climb back to her home.

The crack of a dead branch breaking could be gunfire.

Instinctively she bows her head and runs,
Just like her brother ran the day he died
Caught in the mountains that circle Sarajevo.

Ancient pines conceal the path in shadow.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter. 
11th.- 12th.-24th. January. - March 8th.  2013.
Rewritten August 28th. - 30th. 2014.

For all the brave women who have suffered in wartime.

1st. poem in sequence of  Poems in Times of War