The Monster or The Miracle

I was asleep when the ceiling broke

I woke to breathe a mouthful of dust

My mother was calling my name somewhere

Then the whole room went silent at once

I saw my brother under the doorway

I saw his hand covered in red

I pulled at the stone till my fingers bled

But he never answered me back

My school was a blackened skeleton

My books were soaked in the rain

All my friends were afraid and Trembling

I can never see things the same

I heard the drones all night above me

I learned every sound in the sky

I watched my father stop breathing

I still don’t know why

I drank from a rusty bucket passed around

I waited for medicine to come

I watched my sister grow thin in the dark

I watched my mother go numb

I held a dead hand in daylight

I watched the ambulance burn

I watched the world turn its face away

I learned how to live with hate

At night I still hear the falling

Though the walls around me stand

I wake with my fists clenching my blanket

Trying to pull free from the sand

I can not sleep through a thunderstorm

I can not breathe in a crowded room

Every door that closes behind me

Sounds like a closing tomb

Then you came with a rifle , answers, and lies

You placed it inside of my hand

You told me of evil, told me to stand

You told me I’d be a man

But I saw the child behind your eyes

When you told me to become hard

I saw war smoke in your shaking hands

I saw the boy beneath the hatred

You said, “They stole every piece of your childhood”

Now take a piece of their future away

You gave my grief a direction

You taught my anger to stay

You said, Become the monster they made us

“Give them the fear that you know”

But I was a child in the rubble

And you were that child long ago

Now there’s a child in the doorway

With ash on the side of her face

She is holding her breath in the silence

Like there is no safe place

I kneel down low so she sees me

I don’t put a weapon in her hand

I say, You are allowed to be frightened

You do not have to understand

I give her water and cover her shoulders

I sit while the sirens blare on

I tell her, Your heart is not a weapon

“I will stay till the morning comes”

They can make a monster from mourning

They can sharpen a wound into hate

Or they can hold one small shaking hand

Before it is too late

It is not the child’s choice alone

It is the hand that reaches toward them

And the world they given to know

So stop breeding hate into the children

Stop feeding the fire with fear

When you find a child in the rubble—

Do not just see them as future trouble

You can pack them with anger and feed them with hate

Till the tick… tick… tick… seals a terrible fate

Or you can end the cycle that feeds wars that never cease

Where the thump-thump thump-thump ... is a promise of peace

A warm beating heart that does not explode

A child is not a bullet in the gun you load

The Monster or The Miracle

Their pain is real , not just empirical

Please understand the hell they went through

We need help to create another miracle

Remember, they have a human heart, too.