Sarwa Azeez
Shadows and Guns
Again
winter is wrapping
its heavy skin
around our weak bones.
We skip school
and have snowball fights
all day long.
Then in the evening
our cousin builds a snowman
putting his brother’s helmet
on icy head
gun
in frozen hands.
He was a real hero.
Cousin says with a sorrowful look
into the cold soldier’s eyes.
We look up. Unsure
whether the tears are
from the cold
or from those stabbing memories.
The snowman stands there
strong
the entire time.
until one day we see
that there is only the shadow of a man
with a helmet and gun.
“‘Shadows and Guns’ stems from my childhood amidst the aftermath of the Gulf War, revealing a child’s perspective on post-conflict life, emphasizing the weight of trauma on our delicate shoulders and the ironies of the post-war era.” —Sarwa Azeez
Growing up in wartime Kurdistan, the flickering light of kerosene lantern did not reduce her passion for reading and writing. Sarwa Azeez is a Kurdish researcher, poet and translator. She is a Fulbright alumni, got her second masters in Creative Writing from Nebraska-Lincoln University. Her writing looks for the beauty in a war torn world. It also seeks to define identity and confront issues of equal gender representation and violence in male dominant communities.