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 the 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 grave.
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 when 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 begins the long slow climb back to her home
High on the swart hill.
An irrational fear of losing her unborn baby
Numbs her fraught mind. She exists without true hope,
Nihilistic, empty.
Reminiscent of gunfire
The splintering of a hewn oak
Stings the air.
Instinctively she bows her head and runs,
Just as her brother ran the day he died
Caught in the mountains that circle Sarajevo.
It is hard to keep a footing on this path,
The surface falls away, disintegrates beneath her;
It is porous, grey like ash.
Ancient pines conceal the path in shadow.
Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
11th. - 12th. - 24th. January - 8th. March 2013.
Rewritten 28th. - 29th. - 30th. August - 2nd. - 4th. - 13th. September 2014.
For all brave women caught up in wars.
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