2019 Balocating Prize Winner
Congratulations to Sameed Khan, whose poem "Lament for Aleppo" was chosen by Tyehimba Jess as the 2019 Annie Balocating Undergraduate Prize for Poetry winner.
Lament for Aleppo
Ya Halab,
Your silence sang its clarion call
Past the mortars and their screaming fall
Past the guns in the shouting streets
From the half million dead heartbeats
And the debris stands as witness there
to the corpses unnamed and undeclared.
Ya Ash-Shahbaa (The White One),
your white face now masked in red
Your body scarred by their tank treads
Your laughing streets and towering domes
Now scattered rubble and deserted homes
Your floating parapets and balconies
Ground to dust beneath their marching feet
Your walls, sentry against Kitquba and Tamerlane
Now hear again, the gray refrain
Of cacophony in bullets and shells
The litany of knives delicately held
To draw the deed, to end a painful hope
That your flaming cries would draw to a close.
Pray,
Pray for Aleppo
Whose children cry beneath the ground
Whose final requiem rings and resounds
Crimson tones of death and dreams denied
For here, its burning freedom came alight
Here, its desperate martyrs lived and died
Pray for Aleppo,
Whose elegies have borne and bled
The silent sighs of the watching dead.