After They Bombed the Maternity Ward

Light is birthed in the hospital basement—
a baby girl squeezed from the womb into war.

Far above, sirens wail, and rescuers comb
through shards of glass and overturned incubators,

dust-caked women cradle contracting bellies
and flee the rubble within to the rubble outside,

and mothers still bleeding from birth weep
into swaddled newborns.

Here in the dim, makeshift bomb shelter, the baby
howls out light, all naked and new in her mother’s arms.