Ashes And The Nile Poem by Yousif Ibrahim Abubaker Abdalla

O Sudan,
wounded bride of the Nile,
your bridal dress is stitched with smoke,
your anklets ring with distant gunfire.
O dust of prophets and drums,
how did your rhythm become a requiem?
How did the cradle of the twin Nile
become a cradle of widows and orphans?
We were not born fragments.
We were not carved to be tribes of suspicion.
We were one river one body of water
whispering different names to the same sea.
But war came like a thief at dusk.
It entered our courtyards without knocking.
It wrote its language on our walls
in bullets and in ash.
From the palms of the North
now trembling in hot winds,
to the rains of the South
falling on broken roofs,
from Darfur's horizon red not with sunset but with flame to the patient blue of the Red Sea
watching ships carry away our silence,
we are one breath
choking.
Brothers.
Sisters.
How long shall we watch our mother
divided like spoils?
How long shall we sell her sorrow
to the highest gun?
How long shall hatred harvest
what hunger has spared?
Our disappointment is heavy.
It sits beside us in the dark.
It eats from the same plate.
It sleeps between hope and tomorrow.
Khartoum weeps in dust.
Kordofan buries its sons.
Darfur still counts its scars
like beads of a rosary that never ends.
Yet, even in ruin, the Nile flows.
Even in ashes, seeds remember rain.
Let us rise not with rifles,
but with remembrance.
Not with vengeance,
but with vision.
Let us speak one word
as if it were prayer,
as if it were bread,
as if it were the last bridge left standing:
Sudan.
Not the Sudan of militias and mourning.
Not the Sudan where childhood hides from thunder.
But the Sudan of poets who heal with syllables,
the Sudan of farmers who trust the soil again,
the Sudan where sunset prayer
is louder than gunfire,
and children's laughter
outruns fear along the Nile.
If we do not unite,
we will lose the land to maps without memory.
If we do not love,
we will lose the people to exile and graves.
If we do not stand together,
we will bury tomorrow
with our own exhausted hands.
O Sudanese heart
beat beyond betrayal.
O Sudanese voice rise beyond disappointment.
O Sudanese hands, build where bombs have fallen.
The land is watching us.
The Nile is listening.
History is holding its breath.
And if we unite, no war will define us,
no shadow will finish us,
no darkness will name us.
We will remain,
One Nile,
washing blood into memory.
One land,
learning again how to heal.
One people,
gathering the scattered pieces of dawn.
One Sudan.