In wake of recent events, I thought I needed to write about what’s been going on around the world and profess my grief in the best way I can. Here’s praying that we can heal and live safe still…

I had been ravaged. Scars form ravines on body, scorch marks have become adornments to a bruised, aching form. There are parts of me which remain untouched. And I fear for them. The beauty of my undamaged limbs, praying that they stay their flawless, happy selves.

There was a time. If you rewind the ticking hands of the clocks, the whirring mechanics within them, realigning the stars you could see that I my body was only beaten this way once in a while. The little children of my heart walked uninjured, leaving their soft marks on my bosom. They walked fearless. When demarcation of a God didn’t sway their roots within their homes. Today my mutilated ears, hear the singing and chanting of Ganesh, Allah, Christ, Moses and the like, and I wonder which of them preached to my children that killing me and each other was okay. That throwing balls of fire and letting crimson blood water my soils hurt more than they could imagine.

The salted seas, the tides, my tears of despair. Could you not hear my cries? My despair when you bomb my villages, my diverse hubs of culture, the winding alley ways where one can smell smoke and incense, the babies making sand castles on the beaches, the young students attending school, couples in love?

I wanted to hear the words of the Gods, telling you to stop. Telling you that they didn’t mean for you to destroy. Not the petite cafes of Paris, the universities of Bangladesh, the turbaned galli’s of Baghdad, the dates and Turkish delight shops of Istanbul. That they didn’t mean for you to color the flags of the world, the colors of my skin with blood, and then sign the paining with their names and your religion. But it was either the mutilated state of my ears or perhaps it was the still reverberating echo’s of screaming people.

And yet no word came. No supernatural being raised their hand to stop the carnage. And I felt my faith dwindling and my destroyed body being dug to accommodate life less vessels, cold and stone faced, like pearls to an ever growing necklace, that now seemed endless. Love seemed like a bloodied dream, tolerance clawing it’s way up a cliff that seemed to grow taller with every attack of terror. And yet I prayed still, to every God, chanted to every deity, and hoped that whichever one had meant for terror to reign over my large reaches would draw back and call out to it’s followers, that it would admonish them and return them to me, pure and happy. That it would let the gashes and abrasions on my body heal, the crimson water to dry and for the screaming and despair to stop echoing within my body and pulsing soul.