Dair Mar Elia has Fallen

I stood in the monastery courtyard on the outskirts of Mosul
and watched the blackbirds fly silently over my head,
the war quickly forgotten, like a bad dream upon awakening.
They did not bring me bits of bread as they did St. Elias,
but instead dropped morsels of memory, missing my
two year old son and his mother many a thousand miles away.
Like a sentry, I wandered the high walls and looked out upon
a graveyard of military vehicles rusting in a nearby field.
I visited the cells where prayers could be felt echoing down
the centuries despite cycles of violence and destruction.
Ten years later I learn it has been utterly destroyed
with no stone left to sit upon another, like a piece of
lunar landscape dropped from the sky, devoid of grass
for grazing, the blackbirds gone to find another place to rest.


***