We don’t sleep anymore, waking,
unwaking, all the same nightmare.
Today tragedy killed us — we
are servants of God but the War,
pounding its giant steps, found
our home, and I found all my life,
my daughter’s body, in a gauze
of dust, acrid smoke perfuming
her careful shape, my worried hands
on her death-marbled face, fingers
scared to touch the truth. I
hear my ghost wailing.
..
,,
,,
Steven Croft is the author of two chapbooks, Coastal Scenes and Moment and Time. He has recent poems in Politics/ Letters Live, Sky Island Journal, and As It Ought to Be Magazine.
I am not a silent poet 
Idlib is amazing; if we shrink from hearing what has happened, your poetry makes us experience it, and that is, strangely, a release from guilt because we are no longer guilty of ignoring or escaping it–we do our best to help them bear it, to bear it with them in our heart of hearts–to listen to the grief and be present to it. It’s what poetry does–makes life real in the moment.
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