By Nataly Almomani
11th grade | Florida Virtual School Full Time | Florida
Finalist in the K–11 contest, Peace and Conflict category
With lines from “Amid Unrelenting Attacks on Ukraine, Mental Health Researchers Seek To Understand Psychological Toll” by Richard Stone, a Pulitzer Center-supported story
In the child’s drawing,
the umbrella is too large.
Larger than the buildings.
Larger than the smoke.
Large enough to swallow the sky whole.
Blue and yellow like a bruise.
Underneath it, tiny windows glow faintly
like teeth.
The fighter jets are drawn badly,
crooked black birds with open mouths.
Maybe that is what war does to children.
It teaches them that everything flying overhead
must be hungry.
“Ukraine Wants Peace!”
The words tilt sideways on the page,
as if even the handwriting is trying to run.
At 4 a.m., the sirens begin again.
Not loudly.
Almost politely.
Like something scratching
at a bedroom door.
A woman boils water for tea
while missiles pass overhead.
A student continues highlighting notes
because exams still exist
during the apocalypse.
Someone’s little brother sleeps in the bathtub
with his shoes on.
“I feel like my youth is being stolen.”
There are people whose nervous systems
have forgotten how to unclench.
People who flinch
when microwaves beep.
People whose bodies learned fear so thoroughly
it settled into the bloodstream.
“Not all wounds are visible.”
Some are tucked inside the body carefully,
between strands of DNA,
inside proteins and cytokines
the scientists collect like rainwater.
Even the blood looks frightened now.
Under microscopes,
trauma blooms beautifully.
The brain begins preserving terror
the way flowers are pressed into books.
Flat.
Delicate.
Dead forever.
“Sadly, Ukraine has become a huge field for this research.”
A field.
I imagine scientists kneeling in dark soil
while air raid sirens comb through the sky above them.
I imagine children drawing umbrellas
big enough to cover cities
because the adults cannot.
And somewhere in Dnipro,
a girl colors the clouds black first.
Just in case.
Nataly Almomani enjoys writing things relating to the genres of eeriness, fantasy, and more. She hopes that the art of writing can bring people all over the globe together. To Nataly, writing is not just a hobby or form of art, it is an escape from the real world.
Read more winning entries from the 2026 Fighting Words Poetry Contest.