glaucoma

it’s late in May
the lazy afternoon
coaxes me to go shopping
it seems like I need some repair lotions
or an excuse to mask my loneliness

on my way
it’s hard not to think of my mom
after her diagnosis
how much I want her
to see
with her own eyes
what I will become

the bus smells of old bread
and summer sweat
a memory of tunnels
stuffed with human suffering
while hiding
from the strikes

dislocated
she had to squeeze life
out of barren fields
bleak skies

I don’t know what to call it
resilience
or strokes of luck
the power that made her rise
and rise
through the ashes
and build a safe home
for us

Photo by Ihor Malytskyi on Unsplash

Written by 

Sarwa Azeez is a Kurdish poet, translator, and Fulbright scholar with an MA in English Literature at Leicester University and an MFA from Nebraska-Lincoln University. She is a Pushcart prize nominee and her debut poetry collection, Remote, was published in the UK by 4Word in 2019. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications including Parentheses Journal, Collateral Journal, Writing for A Woman's Voice, the other side of hope, Genocide Studies and Prevention Journal, Kurdish Center for Studies, Wingless Dreamer, and elsewhere. Sarwa's writing draws on her childhood memories of wartime Iraq, where she grew up reading by the flickering light of kerosene lanterns, and searches for the beauty in a war-torn world while seeking to define identity and confront issues of equal gender representation and violence in male-dominant communities. In what little free time she has, Sarwa applies her knowledge of English, Arabic, Kurdish, and Farsi by practicing the subtle art of translating poetry.

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