Blackened parachutes resembling mammoth falcon wings
tumble down from sleek cargo planes beneath cloudless skies.
Together, they add up to less than all the food supplies
which might fill up one land-bound rescue truck. Things
we thought we understood, now take us by surprise –
broken hearts turn genocidal with all that terms implies.
Blame can fall to innocents as if they pulled all the strings,
as if they still held the power to defend their land, prized
for generations, Ottoman deeds spelling out their ties
to rugged hills, olive trees, sand dunes and desert springs.
No one knows how many will survive hunger’s debased stings,
though some families are erased forever. Those who’ve died
are always undercounted when world leaders shout, spout lies
while survivors watch flour, fuel, fava beans with famished eyes.
Mary K O’Melveny, a happily retired attorney, is the author of four poetry collections and a chapbook. Her most recent, If You Want To Go To Heaven, Follow A Songbird, is an album of poems, art and music. Mary’s award-winning poems have appeared in many print and on-line literary journals and anthologies and on international blog sites, including The New Verse News. Mary’s collection Flight Patterns was nominated for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. Her book Merging Star Hypotheses (2020) was a semi-finalist for The Washington Prize, sponsored by The Word Works. Mary has been three-times nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is an active member of the Hudson Valley Women’s Writing Group and her poetry appears in the Group’s two published anthologies An Apple In Her Hand and Rethinking The Ground Rules. Mary lives with her wife near Woodstock, New York.