Genre: Kids, Life,Death, Family, Fear, War

LETTER FROM A SYRIAN CHILD TO HIS MOTHER
by Valentina Meloni

Mom, you never told me

that you can die even breathing

I believed that to die

it would take a wound,

a crack from which life

could come out along with the blood …

Mom, you never told me

that you can die playing

among the stones and the dust

of the road who saw me run.

You never told me

you’d greeted me from so far away

and that, crying, your soul

would come to claim me.

Mom, you never told me

that you can die breathing in a dream,

that the air can also be a poison.

You told me not

I’d be an angel of glass,

asleep, in a white shroud.

Mom you never told me

the death would make me bright and beautiful

sweeping away the fear of bombs.