War Was Not Only a Word
by Özge Lena
that we saw in the dictionary you had saved
from the flames of the library defining this catastrophe
as an armed conflict between two or more parties,
which reminded me of the last party I had been before
the word war, three simple letters, life was a part of me
before this hunger, this poverty, and scarcity, before the night
hunts to seek the remains of my past normality, before you
and me, who found each other thanks to the war, but that party
had a beautiful ending by jumping into the dark sea to swim
under the low moon, that was the first time I saw a missile cutting
the softness of the sky, if war was only a word, how could I
know that those cuts would turn into a rain of razor, that my life
would soon collapse, along with my house, then that I would see you,
standing armless like a torso in Alexandria on the burning ruins
of the library telling me that having a few papers of a book could make
one full all day, so I fed you the war page like it was something
sweet from a party with no arms, without any conflict.
Özge Lena's poems have appeared in The London Magazine, Cambridge Poetry, The Trumpeter, The Gentian, The International Times, and elsewhere in various countries, including the USA, UK, Canada, Singapore, Spain, Iceland, Serbia, France, etc. Özge's poetry was nominated both for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and shortlisted for the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition and the Ralph Angel Poetry Prize in 2021, then for The Plough Poetry Prize in 2023, and for the Black Cat Poetry Press Nature Prize in 2024. Her ecopoem "Undertaker" is forthcoming in the Convergence: Poetry on Environmental Impacts of War Anthology of Scarlet Tanager Books in the USA. Also, her poem “Here is a New Heart For You” was featured in the storefront of the Barnes & Noble bookstore in Dublin, California, for the National Poetry Month 2024.