LET IT BURN

Don't hand me a candle. Hand me the sun.

I want this poem to combust on the page,

to scorch the throat of whoever reads it aloud,

to leave ash where their comfort used to sit.

I am done being reasonable about the unforgivable.

They are counting children in the thousands now

like inventory, like overflow, like acceptable loss

and somewhere a diplomat clears his throat

and calls it complicated.

Say it plainly: a nation state cannot bury

this many small bodies and be called anything

but what it is. Say the word. I dare you.

The world chokes on it, prefers conflict,

prefers both sides, prefers anything

that doesn't require it to stand up.

I want to drag the ummah by its collar

to the mirror and say look.

We quote Badr at dinner tables

and flinch at the price of standing today.

We name our sons Khalid and raise them soft,

teach them the seerah like a bedtime story

instead of a blueprint.

Ali did not write op-eds about justice.

He was the justice, walking, armed, awake at 3 a.m.

checking on the hungry with his own hands.

Where did we misplace that man in all of us?

I am furious at the silence dressed up as neutrality.

Furious at the scroll, the double-tap, the moving on.

Furious at my own reflection some mornings

for laughing at something small

while a mother somewhere is digging with her nails.

Let this poem be an accusation with no exceptions.

Let it name the cowardice in policy rooms

and the cowardice in prayer rooms too

the ones who whisper don't get political

while children learn the sound

a building makes when it becomes a grave.

I don't want to turn black holes to ash.

I want to turn apathy to ash.

I want the comfortable to feel

one ember of what Gaza feels every hour,

what Lebanon feels in the quiet between the bombs,

and I want that ember to never fully go out in them again.

Grief without teeth is just sadness.

Mine has teeth now.

Read it and tell me you feel nothing.

I won't believe you.