Marwa Mohammed (Prepared Angela Kosta)
Moderator 
Marwa Mohammed - Iraq
HYMNS OF THE FORGOTTEN
In moments of loss, when nothing can save us...
Except an old memory that drags us to the shores of oblivion...
We wake up to shattered dreams...
And we travel the dark roads...
We build castles of illusion and mourn our legends...
And so we write...
We write, hoping that words will take us to another place...
A place where confusion never treads...and absence never disturbs...
Who blows dust into the lungs of the soul?
Who awakens the shadows of longing in our cells,
As if they were a wound that never had the luxury of healing?
Who plants doubt in the soil of light...
And guards the gates of absence with a familiar face?
I flow in you, terrified of death, followed by death, with no separation between them, except for an orphaned soul, stumbling in the throng of loss. The ships are wailing songs, lamenting in the corridors of memory whose details have been lost, where forgetfulness does not save us. Rather, it hangs our faces on the nails of absence. Your broken shadow, mirrors, preserves our shattered faces, as if we were features returning from a distant exile. We are the returnees without certainty, without a map, without a light at the end of the tunnel. We carry prophecies that were not written, and we walk barefoot over the ashes of dreams that were extinguished before they were born. We do not know how to grieve for them. We sit on the threshold of waiting, like prophets in whose faces the sky has been closed. We chant patience on the altar of absence, and we patch our consolation with threads of Smoke...
In the nights of wandering,
Myths fell from the shelves of the gods,
And our questions remained suspended from the ceiling of the soul,
Like offerings that no one recognized,
We intersect with Homer in our exile,
And we mourn cities that were not built,
We mourn wars we did not fight,
And we carry on our shoulders,
Hearts that collapsed under the siege of time,
We carry paths taken by fog,
We walk on roads without labels,
We write postponed salvation on the walls,
Then we erase them silently,
Just as we erase our memories in the rush of days,
Because we know that the flood will not wait for another prophet.
Prepared Angela Kosta
