The World

By Marguerite G. Bouvard

Behind my face is another
face that nobody sees.
It carries so many absences:
the fear of a child who has crossed
the border, her father cutting
a barbed wire fence between Syria
and Turkey, Falah, his wife
and their baby daughter changing their
residence for the twelfth
time in Iraq where life turns
on the axis of a roulette, and borders
crop up within other borders, and the cascade
of shouts are not intelligible,
where we have become fugitives
on the streets we once crossed
to buy a loaf of bread or to visit a neighbor,
streets that reflected sunlight
are now filled with wails, its trees
devoid of branches, its doors clanging
in the wind while walls buckle.
This shattered world can only
be pieced back together with
the words brother, sister, friend.