No More Ice-Cream For Taliya Poem by Ernesto Barca

She smiles and giggles
Like a child with a toy,
Tongue-pierced lips guide a path to joy
Kissing around and side-to-side,
She caresses her treat like a mother to child.
Forgetting for a moment her own fate's tide.

Forgetting for a moment her land is cursed
Her lips now deliciously pursed,
Her ears deaf to the world.
She does not hear her mother's scream,
She just sits and enjoys her ice-cream.

Heavens on fire descend to the ground
Screams turn to silence,
A deafening sound.
Smoky remnants float like leaves in Fall
She's too young to sense it all,
She ignores the morbid steam
As she eats her ice-cream.

Fewer souls on streets now roam
Amid fallen angels we cannot mourn
Their lives never lived, though they did try
Now brothers, sisters, mothers, children,
By each other lie.

Snuffed out by war,
These precious lives lost,
And so another tragedy unfolds.
Taliya is next in line you know
For such horrors yet untold.

For now, she sits quietly on the steps
With cone in hand she beams,
Come what may this moment is hers
A brief moment for her to dream.
Her tears dry from the dust can't stream
Her family gone,
Her time will soon come,
But not until she's finished her ice-cream.