We are the sum of your wars.
No flags flutter here.
No gods divide us.
No borders survive the worms.
You called us martyrs,
patriots, collateral casualties.
We are none of those.
We are receipts.
Inscriptions of your edicts,
records of your dominions,
every citadel mortared with our silence.
Right, left, centre
we fed them all.
Every ideology dined on our bones,
every parliament stacked with our ashes,
every temple, every mosque,
a vault for your calculations of death.
Our names were currency.
Our faces banners.
Our silence rehearsed into anthems.
We were not sacrificed.
We were spent.
We remember the taste of gunpowder,
the stench of faith twisted into law,
the quiet screaming of children
buried under your ceremonies.
Bullets do not ask allegiance.
Blades do not check prayers.
Gas does not care for bloodlines.
Rot is bipartisan.
And then there were the ones
who raised banners in our name,
who marched with slogans,
who painted our absence into symbols.
Activists, martyrs, rebels
their mouths loud, their eyes certain.
But most sought witness, not change.
They carried our coffins
like props for their speeches,
fed on applause more than justice,
wore conviction as costume.
Some were broken in cells,
some bartered to power,
some embalmed in monuments,
but most simply performed
their vanity became our gravestone.
And then there's the rest of you,
the silent bystanders with gouged out eyeballs
who still sip from chalices of curated hope,
as if it were not mixed with our ash.
Every statue raised in our names
is your own tombstone.
Every anthem sung above our corpses
is genocide rehearsing itself for acclaim.
We do not rage.
We do not plead.
But, we do not forgive either.
We remain
a chorus of the dead,
your shadow of fire and fracture,
an untarnished chronicle of every lie.
We wait for your ears to split,
for your illusions to crumble,
for the quiet of your conscience
to finally scream the truth.
We wait,
because you are late,
because the dead always arrive first,
and your history will not bury us again.
No comments:
Post a Comment