Mothers of Flame

outside, Kabul exhales smoke and destruction.the city’s spine bent under its own grief,split down the center, wounds gushing bright as embers.the city was born from her body,her forehead pressed against the floor,charred silk sloshing her throat,her tongue searing through muted adhans.

this is where the prayer rug was laid,your mother’s voice unraveling beneath a cracked ceiling,her syllables trembling,bending,gasping,like the flame of an exhausted candle,each scattering small suns across charred wax,sagging under its own heat.

tongues forbidden, stitched shut with law.the muezzin’s call swallowed by curfews,veiled and voiceless:you will swallow the sun until it blisters your throat;you will hold the prayer between your teethuntil it curdles into ash.

your mother’s breath, an apparition ofa blood-hymn pressed between the scorched sunand the hollow of your spine.our faith—unmothered—clutches its torn veil,wandering through corridors of dust.like us, our words were trampled under boots,our books burned into salt.his decrees carved themselves into our ribs,our freedom rewritten in blood.

they call it god.they call it a rule.they call it “mercy and virtue.”

our history will be etched and immortalized.we were mothered in ruin, sanctified by survival.we were daughters swaddled in smoke,lullabies tangled with pellets.

everything here was once a prayer.our sweat that dampened the mat,the quiet beneath airstrikes,mothers recite it as if it hurts to speak,as if language itself was the forbidden fruit.

here, she becomes dust.folded into the shadowed arms of the mountains,their spines shining like ribs under moonlight.the land remembers her shape,each valley a cradle, each scar a hymn.

Kandahar split like a heart cleaved open,34 provinces heaving, water breaking—a home made pregnant with ghosts,thrashing a blood-red pomegranate into bloom.

tell me, this is how we will be reborn:not as silence, but as mothers of flame,keepers of sky, midwives of our own return.

tell me, this is what we were.incarnations of earth and ache,bodies carved from unfinished prayers,the belly of a stillborn dream, ruptured,breathing again through mourning.

so pray me a new country.unshackled, unshrouded, unforgotten.the mother rises, gauze-bodied and luminous,floating above a blackened rug of ash,soaked in everything our mouthswere once forbidden to speak.