The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Language of the Wound is Love by Megha Sood

---

How to Save a Child Fleeing War?

Based on the fact that; “More than 10.5 million people have been displaced by the
war in Ukraine. That number includes 4 million who have fled abroad, half of
whom are children.”
                                                           —The Wall Street Journal, May 12, 2022

i

Open your palms and hold gently
as if you are nursing a wounded bird left astray.
Look for places where a soul has been scarred
those deep ravines of grief slowly making their way.

ii

Gently inspect each layer of their existence,
as it has been shattered and ripped in places.
Look for scathed memories that have been fissured
seeking acceptance for a soul lost astray.

iii

Wipe their face pitted with streaming tears
as they make thin sluices–
for pain deeply carved in their heart
madly hoping for another brighter day.

iv

Unburden their soft shoulders
carrying remnants of a bombed house,
a last toy, and a crumpled family picture
they could barely save.

v

Try to lessen the ache of standing
over a mother’s grave, a day before,
which left them with the inability to voice any pain.

vi

Gently wash their grief of losing a definition of home
being branded a refugee in a span of a single day.
Comfort those soft feeble feet carrying anguish
of a thousand bleeding hearts looking for solace in a stranger’s embrace.

vii

Make sure there is no sudden noise, as minds of grief and terror
get triggered in innumerable ways. Refrain from asking questions
about leaving in the middle of the night, to an unknown place.

viii

Make sure to shower endless love and comfort
on this innocent soul whose life is paying the price
of a senseless war conceived in the devious minds
of tyrants and their greed-stricken ways.

ix

Don’t take them back to the streets
laced with the dead bodies of their loved ones
and their home now turned
into a place of pitted mass graves.

x

Try to teach the lesson of our faceless humanity
this world has to offer to a five-year-old orphan
holding a crumpled photo of their family,
in their soft supple hands, refusing to give it away.

---