She is standing silently in a hole in the wall
A new doorway gaping between crumbled stone
Her face is marred with soot
Eyes a collage of gleaming colours in the night
Unmarred by tears from a too-wide and broken stare

She moves back as you approach
Like a frightened deer
There is nothing human in her eyes
The terror in them speaks nothing
About whoever made these buildings
Or the glass crunching under bare feet
The only colour left on the ground is rust red
Dark-hued glitter looking like stained glass

A bird drifts by far above
Casting a transient shadow on the ground
Your light distorts it into a creature of another age
She cowers from it
Afraid of impersonal death from above
Dropped from taxpayer wallets onto her village

She doesn't know who dropped them
Not this cowering creature shrinking from your sight
Nor does she know why
It could have been her people
Or yours
Or another's
That rained a death that makes acid rain nothing
Trying to save them
Perhaps
Or oppress them
Or not even aware they lived at all

Maybe if asked she would speak
Had she more left to say than fear
Maybe she would say that the only thing
Her people were freed from is living

War requires no reasons
Just excuses
And this trembling child who has survived
All that can be done when bombs fall from clear skies
Is just another statistic

She runs away from you
Who can offer no safety
Into the ruins that also offer none
She runs through the ashes of her life
Fleeing from both the present and past

It might be that she stops some day
In some place where she no longer looks up
Staring into the wide and too-blue sky
Fearful that bombs will fall
Or never stopped falling

Rain falls in sheets
Not mourning but obscuring
Water pounds craters into dirt
Washes away the blood-caked glass
Leaving no sign that she was ever here

- Josh MacLeod, 2002