How does your garden grow?

In Aleppo

the boy

overwhelmed by an adult medic’s coat

tends  the wounded and dying.

Blood has become like water to me.

A shell falls.

Rebel soldiers stealthily tread through rubble

while boys and girls play marbles, skipping, table-football,

in streets battered like crushed cockle shells

as if falling shells were silver bells

and streams of blood were waterfalls

as if the sacred river wasn’t sullied

by blood of bloated bodies,

hands bound behind their backs

before their execution.

Blood has become like water to me.

Shells fall,

rain falls

on corpses.

Blood has become like water to me.

Hundreds of shells fall

and yet you refused to leave your home,

determined to stay and tend your geraniums

in Damascus.