The Wrinkles of the Everyday

 Kaziwa Salih

 

I always wish my nation had not been carved,

 by a century of genocides,
so that I could have belonged entirely to literature,
instead of using the vocabulary of war.

 

I always wish my nation had not been suffering,

So, I could have specialized in metaphor
instead of mass graves,
in the quiet labor of shaping characters
instead of documenting the architecture of annihilation.

There are thousands of stories waiting for me,
crowding the corridors of my mind,
women with luminous secrets,
Men have flowers in hand instead of weapons.
children who deserve to live inside novels
instead of footnotes to catastrophe.

Dozens of unfinished manuscripts breathe beneath my desk.
Hundreds of prose fragments flicker like distant constellations.
Beautiful words press against my soul,
urgent, tender, patient,
yet I cannot turn toward them,
because suffering is louder than lyric.

Every night before I sleep, I make the same promise to myself:
Tomorrow I will look for an agent for my completed novels.
Tomorrow I will return to that unfinished manuscript.
Tomorrow I will rescue those characters waiting in the dark.

After the last publication on genocide
and with the upcoming book on its way,
I had planned to take four years away
from genocide and war,
four years to breathe,
to publish what is already alive within me,
to complete the novels that have waited so long
for gentler times.

But I woke the next morning,
to the news of the Rojava genocide.

And once again,
history seized the pen from my hand.

Once again,
I was summoned back
to the language of fire.

That tomorrow never comes.

One day, I will no longer be here
to hear the breaking news,
to see the headlines bleed across the screen.

And no one will know
that I have been experiencing a genocide too,
the silent one,
the cowardly one,
the malicious, covert one,
that leaves no mass graves,
yet buries a life all the same.

For fifteen years
it has unfolded quietly,
not with bombs,
but with structural knives

wrapped in silk.

For refusing to step
under the umbrella
of the island’s dark patrons
and their small, glittering branches.

For refusing to betray my nation.

In my absence,
they will dare to say:

Some discarded soul from her own nation,
the one she defended,
helped us sharpen the knives.

Tell them, she said,

had a choice
between light and shadow,

If you are darker than the night, because

"Birds of a feather,

flock together."

 Canada, 02-25-2026

This is not a poem, but a poetic expression