Ghosts

Those of you who do not stand here and see what I see,
allow me to be your eyes and bear witness to the horror that lays before me.
Those of you who do not walk this fuming ashtray of shattered hearts and broken souls, allow me to be your feet.

The city is a graveyard, a sprawling necropolis marked by rundown debris and powdered concrete. Blocks of
rubble and battered panels of granite vandalize the asphalt roads, now sizzling flues of napalm and gunpowder.

Flowery plumes of torched yellow and orange shine like beacons of light through the billowing smoke belching from the afterburn of bombshells and mortar, the bewitching amber glow of the flames projecting a luminescent shadow upon the streets of fire enveloping the landscape within a penumbra of doom and despair.

A siren blares somewhere amid the pandemonium, muffled by a tragedy of screams ripping through
the smoldering tendrils of noxious fumes, the wails of the hapless widow, the voiceless orphan,
the nameless mother of a crippled three-year-old, the faceless father of a dead son who just last week
learned how to take his first footsteps clutching helplessly onto his fingers: phantoms; apparitions; ghosts.



— Fahim Ferdous Kibria