when you come out of a war

Martine van Bijlert

seemingly unscathed like                           

                                             let’s face it                        

                                                            most people do

                       (because

                                      there’s always

                                                            so much worse)

it can make you

        feel like you shouldn’t

                                      live too much

                                             or too loudly

                                                            not too happily

some people wail and some people go silent but slowly

I’m starting to believe that the ones like us

who mute ourselves

                                                            out of respect or shame or

                                             guilt over what we didn’t

                               ask for either—

I mean there’s such a thing as a life force

I mean look at the trees pushing out their buds each year                            the flowers

with their blazing colours                            the birds testing the air after a storm tore

at their branches

Martine van Bijlert is a poet, novelist and non-fiction writer who grew up in Iran, now lives in the Netherlands and, in between, worked as an aid worker, researcher and diplomat, mostly in Afghanistan—a country she still closely follows from afar. She is a co-founder of the Afghanistan Analysts Network. She can be found at www.martinevanbijlert.com and https://www.instagram.com/mvbijlert/.