MOURNING [REDACTED]

YEHYA MAAD BARAKAT

---

3rd grade high school
We chose our seats and had one room
It was our city, a society we built
Defining our desks with graffiti
Cheat sheets to help a friend in need
Untold jokes about the French teacher

We were about 60 kids in a classroom
Each trying to forget with lofty smiles
We’re flies stuck in violence’s web
The bell rings and we greet each other
Telling each person good morning
Even the new transfer Dawood
We had our bullies and our soccer jocks
Our nerds and our class president
At the end of the day
Everyone apologized and became friends
There were no grudges
at the end of the day


We had nightmares we needed refuge from
But we figured out a way to drive pain lucid
Yasser beamed at how much his kidnappers wanted
He beat Ibrahim’s amount, saying he was perhaps too polite
Husam was so happy winning his friend’s bullet shell casing
We held them out, our own trading card game
Uthman never imagined the teacher who promised to fail him
Left with no notices, the principal explained to cheers

We learned to be ringmasters to feral beasts
Bending them like a directed dream, we won
Hope was the currency reigning supreme in our bazaar
If one of us cried, we huddle together like mothers
Some of us lost to her, the beaming gunpowder
Hisham disappeared one day, no one bothered to explain
His name became “redacted” in our roll call sheet
Black stripe stretched across a human potential
This is what we become, a censored child's dream

Yehya still retells his jokes, in a poem he writes
About how he told Mr. Salman to tie his shoes
He was wearing a leg brace, the air was light and easy
We breathed it and for once we were in a field

There is a dead tree in our school
If it were alive, we would call her, Um Saalam, Mother Peace
The crows covered her in a funeral veil
Mourning her daily, we learned love from omens
We had no time for grudges
School was our daily reminder
We won’t let war win
Until we become black stripes on roll call sheets
​Or we become birds mourning for the first time