Poem-A-Week

Some days I pretend,

I am still alive,

a warm body, with no cares,

a doting mother, a future

with permutations and combinations,

now a wiped out land.

On one such play pretend noon,

I visit my home where

a scent of fear

welcomes me.

I linger there like a guest,

inhaling it once again.

Making way through 

the façade of destruction
I see my dreams still floating

in my childhood bedroom,
though its happy walls are no more
some clinging to the shrapnel

have been killed with me,

some have settled as dust on the floor.
My nightmares are still tangled
in the web of spiders,
some have been swallowed 

and realized, 

by those incendiary rains
escaping the catcher

they continue to haunt me
in my tomb,

where my tiny

life huddles

in a prison for a crime

I did not commit,

for a war that

had me claimed.