Poetry: Ashraf AboArafe
On the twentieth of January,
Baku was no longer a city—
it became an open heart beneath the sky,
bleeding freedom,
its streets writing in blood
the first verse of independence.
Tanks arrived in the darkness,
iron wolves devouring the light
in innocent eyes,
claiming to “restore order,”
while murdering a nation
so chains might live.
Children fell like flowers in a storm,
bodies piled like shattered dreams
beneath the boots of tyranny.
More than a hundred souls
rose together to the heavens,
and seven hundred wounds
mapped pain
across Azerbaijan’s body.
Yet blood was not the end of the story—
it was its beginning.
It became the people’s signature
on freedom’s decree,
a vow never to be broken:
Baku would not be a prison again,
nor the nation remain silent.
