famagusta

A short walk to the North,  

children did not huddle 

in the rubble of their  

homes. 

They never had the chance,  

the 1974 invasion was 

fast and honest. 

Forty years later,  

one of those children 

sees her home  

from the contrived road,  

but cannot go to it. 

A Greco ballad of bullet-sunken limestone  

rang out  

in churches where  

God became begged for—  

gardens where ash 

fertilized the barren sand lapped at by  

Aphrodite’s tears, 

while her children’s homes were scorched. 

Flowers, gasping through 

the cracks in her mother’s old 

bookcase, no longer  

grow to breathe. 

Famagusta— 

you grave  

of memories 

of inheritance buried 

in a shallow tomb 

in the floral-printed nursery turned  

tourist site. 

Childhood 

homes threaten to collapse upon 

entry, under the watchful eye of  

a gun barrel. 

Birthplace turned occupied territory— 

she sees her house 

behind “no-trespassing” signs, and 

can no longer cry. 

Grief is stagnant  

in the shadow of the battered cross. 

They built villas you can rent out  

on the beach 

by her father’s grave— 

I sit in one. 

We all do.