POEM - THE WAR THAT DOES NOT END, Poetess - Thi Lan Anh Tran (Aschaffenburg, Germany)

THE WAR THAT DOES NOT END

Thi Lan Anh Tran
Aschaffenburg, Germany


My mother never told stories
the way books do.

She would pause in the middle of words,
as if something beyond language
was heavier than memory itself.

There was once a garden—
not the kind you visit,
but the kind that remembers you.

The soil carried more than roots.

I grew up far from alarms,
far from skies torn open,
yet at night
I still feel a quiet pulse beneath the earth—
steady, buried,
refusing to leave.

They say time moves forward.
But memory stays still.

It waits.

Elsewhere in the world,
men sit across polished tables
carefully choosing their words:
ceasefire,
security,
shared interest.

Their voices are calm.

Somewhere, a child learns
the difference between thunder
and something that is not weather.

A city learns to dim its lights
without calling it fear.

A mother learns silence
so deeply
it becomes a way of breathing.

I stand between what has ended
and what is repeating.

Nothing returns exactly the same—
yet nothing truly disappears.

War does not always arrive in fire.

Sometimes it remains—
in the body,
in language,
in the hesitation
before trusting tomorrow.

If history breathes,
it does not speak in victory.

It exhales slowly
through those who remember
what others are still becoming.

© 2026 Thi Lan Anh Tran – All rights reserved.