BABIES IN BUNKERS

Can a poem stop a bullet? Maybe the answer is, "When we stop writing such poems, when we stop reading them, when we stop letting them disturb our comfort, what have we become then?"

By Aayushi Rana

 

Can a poem stop a bullet?

Can verse silence the sound of falling bombs?

These are the questions that hover over Meher Pestonji's Can Poetry Halt War, a collection that refuses to look away from the bloodiest realities of our time.

The title itself is a challenge, almost a dare. It acknowledges what we all suspect, that poetry cannot physically stop wars. Yet, Pestonji writes anyway, with an urgency that suggests perhaps the real question is not whether poetry can halt war, but whether we can remain human without it.

 

The Weight of Witness

This is not a book you read for comfort. It is from the very first poem, to the very end that Pestonji challenges us to see what we might prefer to click past: the mutilated bodies of children, the collapse of homes into rubble, the transformation of lullabies into sirens. 

In Helpless Anger, she writes of "blood-soaked babies" and "tiny mutilated bodies" with a directness that refuses to aestheticize suffering. The poem names what it sees, "headless babies", because to soften the language would be to betray the dead.

It is the moral honesty that makes these poems so potent, not merely the craftsmanship. Pestonji does not hide behind metaphor when metaphor would be a luxury the dying cannot afford. Her anger is not helpless at all; it pulses through every line, demanding that we feel what she feels, see what she sees.

In Whose History? Pestonji tackles the dangerous flexibility of historical narrative. She asks whether white Europeans actually civilized, or decimated the indigenous communities in America, the original residents of this vast land since centuries, now called the Native Americans; whether the British modernized or looted India, whether Russia protects or expands.

The poem acknowledges that perspective shapes how we tell these stories. But then comes the turn, the moment where moral relativism collapses:

 "History cannot be used to confuse today's issues… There can be no excuse for killing kids."

This is the heart of the collection, the refusal to let complexity become an excuse for cruelty. Yes, history is contested. Yes, every conflict has roots that tangle deep into the past. But a dead child is a dead child, regardless of which narrative we choose to believe. Pestonji insists that some truths transcend perspective, and that

"blood soaked soil creates fertile fields

fueling fires of revenge

when today becomes tomorrow's history."

 

The Transformation of Victims into Villains

Veto the Veto is perhaps the most politically direct poem in the collection. In just six short lines, Pestonji captures a painful irony:

"Once-upon-a-time's victim becomes today's villain."

The poem does not name names, it doesn't need to. We know which histories she references, which victims have become perpetrators, which suffering has calcified into the infliction of suffering.

The call to ‘Ban the veto’ is a demand for accountability in a world where power protects power. "Solidarity in evil makes monsters multiply," Pestonji writes, pointing to the systems that enable atrocity through inaction. The poem is brief but devastating in its clarity.

Babies in Bunkers may be the most heartbreaking piece in the collection. It imagines the inner voice of children cowering in shelters: "Were we born only to die before we turn five?"

These are babies with "eyes frozen in shock," babies whose first experiences are not of love but of hate, not of peace but of bombs, not of life but of death.

This is not the language of diplomacy or measured analysis. It is the language of someone who has looked too long at images of suffering and cannot find words soft enough to contain her fury.

Why This Book 

Can Poetry Halt War is not a normal read, and it should not be approached as one. This is not a collection to admire for its linguistic innovation or formal experimentation.

These are cries, urgent, raw, unpolished cries, from the places where bombs fall and children die. Pestonji covers Palestine, the position of women in conflict, the politics and propaganda that surround war.

And there are moments where the poems' directness might feel too blunt for some readers, where the political stance might seem too unambiguous, where the emotion threatens to overwhelm the craft.

These concerns feel small in the face of what Pestonji is trying to do. She is not writing for critics or academics. She is writing for anyone who still has the capacity to be moved by suffering, anyone who still believes that bearing witness matters, anyone who wonders whether language has any power left in a world that seems immune to words.

The real achievement of Can Poetry Halt War is not that it answers its titular question, but that it forces us to ask better ones. If poetry cannot halt war, what can it do?

It can refuse to let us forget.

It can insist that the dead were people, that the rubble was once homes, that the numbers in headlines were once babies with names and futures.

So, maybe the answer is not whether poetry has the power to stop war. Maybe the answer is, "When we stop writing such poems, when we stop reading them, when we stop letting them disturb our comfort, what have we become then?"

Reading Pestonji's collection, I found myself writing as well, my pen moving as if driven by a slow, restless, tragic force, unable to remain silent:

They ask if poetry can stop the guns

but I ask

can silence keep us human?

Each verse a candle against the dark,

each word a refusal to forget.

Ultimately, this is what this steadfast book of poems, Can Poetry Halt War?, accomplishes.

It refuses, it remembers, it insists that we stay awake.

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Aayushi Rana is a post-graduate History student from Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) and Senior Researcher at Digital Forensics Research Analytics Centre (DFRAC), a Delhi-based fact-checking organization. She is also a Digital Forensics trainer, having conducted training sessions for journalists from across the world, and for school students in Delhi on misinformation, fake news, digital safety, and skilled verification techniques. A former English and Social Sciences educator at a prestigious private school in Delhi, her work currently focuses on media literacy and socio-political research.