Across the earth
they lie in fragments of geography
never meant to become home.

A boy from Liverpool
beneath cold soil in Gallipoli.
A girl from Kyiv
buried where the wheat fields burn black.
A son of Lagos
lost somewhere beneath jungle rain.
A mother from Gaza,
a father from Donetsk,
a medic from Kandahar,
a conscript from Nebraska-
all carried outward
by flags and speeches
that promised glory
and delivered silence.

The cemeteries are orderly.
War likes order after chaos.

Rows of white stone.
Crosses. Crescents. Stars of David.
Numbers without names.
Names without bodies.

The dead are catalogued carefully
long after they were discarded carelessly.

And still they search.

A granddaughter opens old letters
creased with the fingerprints of history.
A son waits beside a telephone
that has not rung in fifty years.
Somewhere divers descend
through black water
looking for bones trapped in steel coffins.
Somewhere else
a patch of forest refuses to surrender
its dead.

The missing are never entirely gone.
They survive in photographs fading at the edges,
in medals tarnished green,
in uniforms folded inside drawers
that smell faintly of dust and rain.

There are walls now.

Granite walls,
marble walls,
walls that carry thousands of names
of those who never became old enough
to complain about taxes,
or grow bitter about politics,
or hold grandchildren on tired knees.

Names carved so deeply
because memory itself
keeps trying to erode.

Tourists walk quietly there.
Some cry.
Some touch the stone
as though warmth might answer back.

But I always wonder?

where are the politicians buried?

Where lie the men
who stood behind polished podiums?
drawing borders with fountain pens
while villages burned beyond the map?

Where are the architects of invasion,
the manufacturers of slogans,
the men who called slaughter
“strategy,”
“security,”
“collateral,”
“necessary sacrifice”?

Not here.

Not among the drowned boys
or the women buried beside shattered hospitals.
Not beside the unnamed soldier
whose jawbone was found
inside a farmer’s field.

They sleep elsewhere-
beneath statues,
inside state funerals,
inside mausoleums guarded by ceremony.

History often buries power
with honours.

It buries soldiers
with questions.

And the earth keeps swallowing both
without preference.

The dead do not argue anymore.
The dead have escaped ideology.
No anthem reaches them now.

Rain falls equally
on every grave.

The snow covers all uniforms
with the same white surrender.

And somewhere tonight
another young man folds a letter and puts it in his pocket.
Another young woman kisses someone goodbye
believing absence will be temporary.

Already, the soil is waiting.