By Diyora Kabilova
10th grade | Homeschooled | Uzbekistan
Finalist, Peace and Conflict Category
With lines from “A Mother and Baby From Gaza Are Reunited 11 Months After Being Separated at Birth” by Elissa Nadworny, Fatima Al-Kassab, and Claire Harbage, a Pulitzer Center reporting project
(a descant of grief, guilt, and quiet survival)
The kettle sings. The rice runs white
beneath the faucet’s mourning light.
I sift the grains like bone through ash—
a funeral in a porcelain sash.
The anchor speaks in neutral tones
of shattered towns and crumbled homes,
a mother screaming in a tongue
I never learned, but somehow know.
A boy is pulled from under stone.
His fingers blue, his eyes half-closed—
he could be mine, he could be kin,
if I were born a breath from sin.
But I was born in softer lands
where violence blooms in secondhand,
where war is pixel, war is drone,
and grief arrives through telephones.
I scrub the bowl. The starch runs red.
My hands are shaking, soft with dread.
The screen goes on. The cries go mute.
I salt the rice. I peel the fruit.
And somewhere far, the ground still bleeds.
And somewhere else, a woman keens.
And I—inside my quiet sink—
am too well-fed to even think.
I pour the rice into the pot.
I pray to gods I have forgot.
What right have I to sleep or dream
when someone’s sky is split with screams?
The jasmine steams. The news moves on.
The dead are named, then quickly gone.
And still I rinse. And still I stir.
A witness made of bone and blur.
Forgive me, child I’ve never known,
for drying hands on softened stone.
The world has made me deaf and tame—
my peace a luxury, my shame.
Diyora is a 15-year-old Uzbek writer who loves small moments—things like washing rice, soft music in the background, or the quiet of late evening when the world feels slower. Writing helps her hold onto what she feels before it disappears.
She don’t write to impress or to explain. She writes because something moves in her and asks to be noticed. Her poems usually start with a small image, a sound, a memory. Then she just follows it to see where it goes.
Read more winning entries from the 2025 Fighting Words Poetry Contest.