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The girl  wearing a rose garland  holding  tulips
between skinny fingers    goes to sleep on a cold con-
crete slab in the city square. It's night & here, we are
calling on hope. But just what is hope when dawn
breaks /& opens up her innocence to this sad world
like the gutting of an arrowed pigeon?  what is hope
if not this fickle intuition    this powerful longing?
Home in a wartorn country is ________________
a.                                    a museum        of dry bones
b.     an orchestra       of hollow mouths  singing
                                                                   songs of hunger
c.      ash                        & coal                         & fire
d.                a land bearing craters              like  scars
                             on a body pregnant with  bombs
e.                 the song                    within   the belly
                                                   of a broken-winged bird
Today   a man carried in his mouth   the heavy song
of his child's body —an elegy to the lighthouse & I,
holding this image   within my mind like an enigma
voice broken pleas to rain as the panacea for this fire
burning men into ash                   because tomorrow
another  child   will wake up   in the body  of a ghost
& this fire will burn   another mouth into a dirge.

Timi Sanni is a writer, editor, and Muslim literature advocate. He is the Founding Editor of Iman Collective, a Muslim literary magazine. A NF2W poetry and fiction scholar. His work has appeared or is forthcoming at Palette Poetry, Down River Road, Drinking Gourd Magazine, Temz Review, X-R-A-Y Literary, and elsewhere. He is a reader for CRAFT and Liminal Transit Review and an editor at Kalopsia Literary. He is the winner of the SprinNG Poetry Contest and Fitrah Review Short Story Prize 2020. He was also nominated for the 2020 Young Writers and Creatives Award. Find him on twitter @timisanni.