On The Shores We Lived
written by: Hua Ai
In woods where history hangs itself,
laments are sung for the chased skulls—
each a foreign season’s anthem,
even as they were broken in two themselves.
The collapsed libraries and lovers’ bridge
gutted the Sava River—
the mirror of Sarajevo’s wounds.
How far does hunger drive flesh across borders?
Waves return wearing feathers of the crippled.
Seagull wings command tides that swallowed my first home.
I, ransacked, kneel while only the dead giggle at their release;
torch half-bare against icons gone cold in the blitz
while the spring winds lord over votive racks,
counterfeiting peace
that was never mine nor yours.
Steamboat hulls and exposed fish ribs
testify against
empires of deception, splitting history’s amnesia awake.
I stand shrouded in that shiver that follows bombardment—
water carrying us all, merciless as governments,
toward shores that reject our names.
Certainty arrives unwelcome as midnight deportation—
neck of movements snapped by yellow boundaries,
the twilight of our homeland forced down our tongues.
They promised us a land of honey and milk;
as diplomas vanish at customs,
and CVs rot in mailboxes.
They seduced us with wages in car wash’s suds,
rockstar’s fingerprints orphaned
from guitar chords and drum’s lambskin.
They wheedled away our rights to leave from contracts,
dreams of dancers and singers turned wannabes
beneath Soho’s red lights.
Tiny, tiny…, far away from the wonderland
of bow-tied gentlemen and English tea.
Faint… faint… breathing small
and counting the untidy tips
in the folds of whipped breasts.
The beggar’s hands,
cauterized
by childhood’s exploding fuse,
deafened us from omens whistling
through bullet casings.
Dozens of hatchlings canned in shells
watch mothers wade into the machine-gunned distance.
Their children—jagged languages—
face the Black Sea’s cargoes
salivated by traffickers of breath and skins.
They whisper, thin as rationed bread:
“In March, swallows will carve us
into petitions on camera-ready banners.
In May, peace doves will harvest
our skulls
for museum’s sorrow.
When we all lie alone
beneath this river’s militarized belt,
our blood will finally transmute into moribund blue—
connecting soils of countless unremembered cities
beneath a single bank that unites
all our scattered bones.”
- On The Shores We Lived - June 6, 2025
