
People of Addis Ababa welcoming President Isayas, 14 July 2018, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Photo by Hailu Wudineh TSEGAYE at Shutterstock.
Strangers in the Same Land
—in response to current events in Eritrea and Ethiopia
Hello?
You don’t know me; but,
I am so excited to speak with you.
Strangers—
at once the same…but different.
Divided by violence
Splintered and torn from one another
Families…
Friends…
Strangers…
At once so close
Yet so far
Now they are working together to close..........................the gap.
The border which became a
silent
canyon.
Echoing......................................................................echoing.....
Echoing only with ORDNANCE!
With SCREAMS!
Tearing tears rolling down cheeks so similar on either side of the void—
Chasm filling with
Bodies
Different tongues….
The border/canyon is closing
Slowly
Impossibly possible
The earth closes her metaphorical wound,
Knits together once more—
More than a decade of salt poured in by divisive ideologies
Is being washed clean and
The Birth Place and the Cradle seem not so distant from one another
And from a knitting of flesh
Of blood
Of bone
Of brothers
From the scar shared between them—a flower of tentative hope
Opens its face to the sky.
Hello?
You don’t know me, nor I you; but,
I am so excited to speak with you.
Jyoti
South Africa: Star Khulu said, “I try everything, everyday not to get raped.”
Bangladesh via the Rakhine State: Fatima, name changed for privacy, raped into unconsciousness said, “I don’t know how many times they violated my body.”
Northern Iraq: Aveen, in a halting, whispering voice, “There was nothing they didn’t do to me,” she tried to hold back tears.
She.
Tried.
To.
Hold.
BACK.
Tears.
Names and accounts melt
Into numbers
Countless numbers
Numbers.
Beyond counting.
Too many
No country/no city/no village/no family
Nowhere too safe
No immunity to a virulent, Holocaustic disease
It makes plague seem like a lark
And what could be worse than that black, unclean death?
This—shocked to zombie state life.
This—look over your shoulder life.
This—bruises that I make excuses for life.
This—never again un-suspect/suspicious life.
This pandemic.
This cancerous, ulcerated canker
Is treated op-ed
Diagnosed and medicated in sound bites
We are women.
The Sheila-na-gigs
Willendorf goddesses
Gaping mawed Kalis from which all draw breath even from death
Again and again
We are #metoo and even that seems
A distant cry
Tinny
Lost in and amongst distance, indifference inducing diffidence
Yesterday’s news
We are holes
We are wholes
Even in this disjointed world
Age-upon-age-upon-age
Nothing has changed
Teju Cole wrote, “Not all violence is hot. There’s cold violence, too, which takes its time and finally gets its way.”
I supplicate
I am prostrate with ocean wide tears
Fallen to silence
My waves do not crash
Do not create
But they implore
Do not forget
Grow careless
Stop listening
To the uncomfortable quiet
From the voided vessel
There is no scream loud enough
No silence long enough
To bear this.
To not bear this.
Circular Haiku Circle
She, stone in water,
Bedrock. Will wear to nothing
In passage of time.
For she adds herself
Into brackish solution
Giving, as it takes.
Imagination
Firing in bold empathy,
Shakes ashes from flame.
Breath of nothingness
Stirring mindfully, waking,
Breathes deeply again.
Transmutes into earth
Solidifies. New construct.
Grows, so lives again.