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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.