Taylorian

TAYLORIAN 2024

91

Poetry

Bunker Food’s getting cold,

A mother sits on a cold mattress and holds her child tight, As if he’s going to slip away if she lets go for just a second. The mother’s buried face in his hair, he sits there silent without a word, He’s only 5 but he doesn’t cry, because he doesn’t know,

And his older sister next to him doesn’t cry, because she isn’t allowed to, The reverberating steel walls project the sound of the fatal fireworks outside, Their feet are getting wet, The room shivers along with them, dust falls onto the ground imitating the ashes around the city, The door is as closed as it can be, but the scarlet honey light from the city on fire seeps in, Glimmering as if just behind the door is a pile of shinning gold, The walls continue to bang and clash like a drum set, One of the instruments in the orchestra of infernal chaos in this warzone, It groans and trembles because it knows it’s weak, It knows its flaws and knows if it remains standing it was luck that kept it alive A soldier who no one ever believed in,

And who no one will ever believe in, The family it shields and tried its best to protect loath its existence and curse it, They want to get out, to go back inside their proper home, The family is hungry, And the food is getting cold.

Yoshi Takeda Castro (L6th)