Tears of the Mountains, Cries of the People

The skies did not whisper this time,

they roared.

A darkness gathered over Bunir’s hills,

not the velvet dark of night,

but the heavy, swollen silence

that comes before a storm unleashes its wrath.

And then it came—

the heavens tore their heart open,

pouring ceaseless torrents upon the land.

Mountains wept rivers they had never held,

streams clawed their way into valleys,

and earth itself seemed to shudder under

the endless, merciless flood.

It began as a drizzle,

a kind many had welcomed before—

for rain is a friend to the farmer,

a blessing to the fields.

But soon the drizzle grew teeth,

gnashing against rooftops,

snarling down the slopes,

until its hunger knew no bounds.

Villages, once alive with laughter,

children running barefoot on sun-baked paths,

women carrying pitchers of water on their heads,

men bent over their fields in toil and hope—

all were swallowed whole.

Walls of mud and stone,

roofs that once sheltered dreams,

crumbled and melted into the rushing tide.

The flood was not just water.

It was hunger, it was fear,

it was the cry of mothers clutching children

against their chests,

their feet sinking in silt,

searching for ground that no longer existed.

It was cattle swept away like fragile twigs,

grain stores undone in a breath,

books, photographs, and prayers

erased in a single cruel gesture.

And as the rivers howled,

they dragged away not only earth and stone,

but memory.

Ancestral homes that stood for generations

were pulled into the whirl of oblivion.

A child’s name carved into a doorframe,

a grandfather’s prayer rug by the window,

a bride’s painted hands against a wall—

all dissolved,

all perished beneath the water’s rage.

Some tried to resist.

They tied ropes from one tree to another,

built makeshift rafts of doors and broken planks,

shouting the names of neighbors

into the roaring void.

But the water was faster,

stronger,

more ruthless than any human arm could fight.

The night echoed with voices—

pleas, prayers, goodbyes—

and then silence,

a silence heavier than stone.

Bunir became a wound.

A silence spread where once stood villages,

where smoke of evening fires

rose like offerings to the sky.

Now only the stench of mud,

the ache of hunger,

the tremor of loss remain.

Yet even in the ruin,

one can hear the heartbeat of the people.

Among shattered beams and drowned fields,

they gather stones to build again.

Their eyes red with sleepless nights,

their hands raw from pulling neighbors from the tide,

they carry a fire inside them

that no flood can extinguish.

A man lifts the Quran,

wet but not broken,

from the rubble of his home.

A woman digs into the silt

to find the bracelet her daughter once wore.

A boy wades knee-deep in muck,

holding a goat he saved from the current.

Fragments of life cling stubbornly to the living,

proof that Bunir still breathes.

The children will one day laugh again

on Bunir’s green slopes.

The mothers will plant seeds

in fields once smothered by silt.

The call to prayer will rise,

echoing against scarred but unbroken mountains.

But until then,

there is mourning.

There is grief etched into every face,

every cracked wall that still stands,

every tree stripped of its leaves.

Let the world not forget.

Let not this grief sink into silence.

These waters were not only rain,

but a mirror of neglect,

a reminder that those who live by rivers and hills

stand vulnerable, unseen,

until disaster forces their names into our mouths.

O Bunir,

you are more than the wreckage the flood left behind.

You are the resilience of your people,

the stubborn bloom of wheat through broken earth,

the unyielding will to rise again.

And though the flood tried to erase you,

your story is carved into the very rocks

that withstood the tide.

It will be sung in mourning,

and one day in triumph—

when your fields turn green again,

when your rivers run gentle,

when your lost villages live on

in memory and in the courage

of those who survived.