Girls of Minab, Iran

Written by Iris Zhu from Deerfield Academy, Massachusetts, USA

Holes dot the earth like the lotus plant:

wide-mouthed and eager.

Beneath the dirt, there are girls

with petals in their hair.

When the rain falls next year,

I think they will flower.

The mothers arrive in flocks

like carrion birds circling the dead.

There is nothing to scavenge

but limbs and schoolbags packed that morning.

They shake pictures of their precious girls 

in front of cameras:

Look at what you took from me.

They cry, howl, scream, repent,

grieve, cry again, curse their gods, the sky–

the sky that rained with merciless sound,

the sky that took their girls, 

the sky that packed them into wooden boxes 

barely four feet tall.

The world will forget tomorrow.

But the sky, she is not to be blamed.

She may rain. She may snow, thunder, sleet.

But she did not take these girls.

It was not weather but will that dug these graves.

It is no accident,

when earth

is overturned

to make space for someone else’s children.