Title: At the End of the Battle, the

Poppy Grows

Royal Club for Literature and Peace 

Title: At the End of the Battle, the

Poppy Grows

Kasia Dominik

Title: At the End of the Battle, the Poppy Grows

She lives in a windowless tunnel,

The walls are rubber, the floor sand.

Her nights taste of unripe fruit,

The mornings rise with the faces of empty mannequins.

She doesn't write to frighten, to mock the roads.

She saw shadows crying outside the door.

She has snow in her pockets, wind in her shoes,

and sun streaming from her shoulders.

She wants to share this,

health like a forest in the rain,

that bursts with leaves in the desert.

.

She longs for words to stop getting lost in labyrinths, and for her hands to find earth softer than bread.

And when the next dawn comes,

maybe she'll look at herself as if she had never

been a mirror cracked in half..

Kasia Dominik

(Poland)