In December’s cold light the city
became a wound that has not healed,
as ideology fermented into permission,
and soldiers drunk on supremacy,
under orders but still men,
cut through streets,
severing humanity from its umbilical cord,
translating blood purity to actual blood,
as women and children became
erased like flowers from a stranger’s garden,
and the dead piled into the Wasteland of silence
became the food of rats and maggots.

The ghosts press against our forgetting,
asking not for revenge but recognition,
a simple speaking of what was done,
for in Nanking, we saw not men but
the Dragon, with claws and teeth
and the blazing fire of power that
can consume the whole world.

 

30/1/2026