Every night the virgins await in the dynamite,
exploded sky.
Here clouds are ash
and even doves and swallows breathe
the smoke of explosives and burning cars.
The virgins are transparent, a gauze of flesh,
a silk fabric of muscles and quiet like harps
or guitars resting against walls.
They long for the home they’ve never been to
and here, in the Semtex, C4 and TNT filled sky,
there are no prayers, tombs
no order or justice, no candlesticks.
The 72 virgins look down on a massacred landscape
of ice-cream shops, markets, buses and border crossings.
In the dream, a spectre is haunting heaven:
hundreds of thousands of virgins –
used and discarded apple cores.

—Jennifer Clement

In our ECO LIT series, Red Canary Magazine dedicates space for established writers and emerging voices to imagine better ways of being.