吀栀ese Dark Skies 23 Brianna Boylan Dawn glares down upon us, / The muddy, the miserable, and the drained; / The morning air sends a chill through our bones / As we resign ourselves to another day. / We scavenge our own souls amongst those we have lost, / But there are only fragments amongst this sea of limbs and bodies— / Nothing that can be made whole, / Nothing left to identify. / The whistles and shouts are all in vain; / Our Lord Death crawls into our maze of tunnels. / Mustard seeps into our bones and burns our 昀氀esh, / It chokes us and bleeds us as we claw for breath. / We 昀椀red more shells than usual that day, / And as we rest 昀椀tfully under the moon’s spotlight, / The lullaby of artillery rocks us to sleep— / That night, and every night since. / We return home beaten and broken and stitched back together; / The world moves on, but we remain lost on the battle昀椀eld, / Waiting for someone to say, “Jump!” / So we can say, “How high?” / Picking up the pieces of ourselves, / We stumble through our new, normal lives; / Wandering through cobbled streets of poverty and broken glass / As an evil thunders in the distance. / We watch the world descend into chaos for a second time, / Everything around us shattering into a thousand pieces. / Our neighbors watch us as we head to the trains, / Forced to leave our new homes behind. / These words are old and full of hate / When we arrive at the Devil’s gates. / It won’t be long now; / We look up into the sky. / No longer do we see the point in asking, “Why?”