Portraits [Audio]
A woman leaned her back on a broken wall
her face a deep secret in her hijab
her eyes reddened with sorrow.
She remembered the charming beauty
of her now flaming city.
A week before the war,
she was a proud mother of two
a wife to a graceful husband too.
That day,
she was left a widow
a villoma shattered like a broken window.
In Rafah,
a journalist nearly drowned in
a flood of citizens’ blood.
And Al Jazeera reported it not
And the BBC reported it neither
They knew the world would see a nightmare—
of a bloody city and deserted homes.
In Gaza,
It's the dead who bury the dead
a day after God forsook Palestine
In trauma.
Redeem, redeem
but couldn't bear the cost of her existence.
I wish, I wish I could paint a portrait of
all I saw from the dark-to-dark corner of
Al Bureij, where they strum bullets
At refugees with little songs of grief.
adut loi akok
Adut Loi Akok is a South Sudanese award-winning poet and a spoken word artist currently based in Kigali, Rwanda. He is the author of two poetry books—“If Only The City Cries” and “The Beauty Within Us”—and a UN-YOUTH Fellow. Adut is the 2022 national second poetry winner of the art competition sponsored by UNFPA in his country, South Sudan., and became a guest poet at the #ShareYourLight campaign by UNHCR Africa, 2023. His work has been featured in Kalahari Review, Plot Creatives magazine, Konch magazine, Scribes Ink Publishers, Mount Kenya Times and several other anthologies, including The Best New African Poets and My Mental Health Anthologies, 2022.