The ugliness of the thing of war,
when its springs come,
when its ravaging echoes knock at your door,
it is then that the scourge of war brews doom,
But … you serve it willy-nilly,
unwillingly you keep it company,
Still, for it to mute how hard you pray.
Asrat, poet and journalist, criticized wars. He was
arrested and imprisoned without charge in 2001,
along with 16 other journalists during a crackdown
on the press in Eritrea. In 2020, poet Linton Kwesi
Johnson named Asrat as the “International Writer
of Courage.”
From A Poem A Day: African Continent
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