There was a lot of dust.
Vivid particles of despair,
Just floating in the air,
Aimlessly pushed around by the screams of dying women,
Bewildered children
And hapless men;
Prodded into meaningless action.
For this dust has nowhere to go,
Cannot settle,
And the soil isn't red yet.
It blows into the blinded eyes,
of those already bereft of sight.
It lends chaos to the tumultuous,
Stirs up loud cries into physical pain,
Displaced by the panicked sprints
of ectopic humans;
It accompanies them to their
impending grave.
But can dust take on more character than one?
It wrapped itself around bleeding naked women,
as if to shield the ungainly sight;
of flesh treated as mere flesh.
A sordid, sepia-toned scene
capturing humanity almost inside out.
It blew into the mouths of crying children,
for whom food was now
Another's life instead of their own.
Stealthily sneaking into the stomach,
it settled in the blood,
twisting itself around the helix of times to come.
It blew into the nostrils of all men,
Cocaine to the already power-drugged hallucinatory talibs,
Flakka to the threatened "innocents",
Now running amok for survival
of only the 8.
In dust,
Survival takes on a deep crimson hue.
For what is in all; ordinarily for all,
now survives only for blood's crimson.
All others,
like mere words,
left forgotten in the murky air.
Dust dulls the sound of pain;
and blurs its searing images.
Only the duality of survival survives:
Gunshots and screams;
Manic laughter and anguished cries,
Barked orders and desperate shrieks for help.
No one can say which came first:
and yet everyone is now split into two.
The dust has yet far to travel,
with rains having forsaken the land of red rivers.
And maybe it will settle
when the world knows its scent.
'Dust storms can happen any time of the year in Afghanistan. On average, Afghanistan experiences blowing dust one to two days per month in the winter and six days per month at the height of the summer. Nature is full of metaphors, if we only look out for them. It's dustier than ever in Afghanistan now, and I hope and pray, it settles soon.
(P.S. - Facts from Nasa Earth Observatory)
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