Speak – A Lamentation
By Vijaya Sundaram
©May 2nd , 2015
Spine broken,
Voice box crushed,
Yet another young man
Dies, beaten in the race
Of life.
Twenty-five years alive —
Now, older than time.
Life stretched before him
Before death came
Cruelly, in the back
Of a nickel-ride van.
He broke his own spine, they say.
They lie! How they lie!
Our hearts fail us, sense falters —
Brazen untruth spewed from mouths of
Killers, snuffers of the weak,
The disenfranchised,
Our police ride strong,
While a son is dead.
He broke his own spine, you say?
I laugh in disbelief.
But some buy their story
Listening with stretched ears
To lies pouring from all sides.
For lies sustain some,
And comfort them, while
They sit spellbound,
While flat-screens, plasmic,
Pour out flat people
Speaking flatly about
A three-dimensional world
Rendered two-dimensional —
A grotesque Guernica
Sans history, sans meaning,
To those who sit,
Gesturing with painted fingernails,
Dyed hair, painted-on smiles,
Or communing with
Neatly slicked-back hair and
Business suits, patent-leather shoes,
Sputtering about matters they know not of.
But this death looms over us, while
Yet more voices arise —
An ark on a wave of sorrow.
And who will ride this wave?
And who will bring the ark
To land again?
And who will bring back
The olive branch, the olive leaf
And who will sight land?
And who will stand tall
And who will speak
And whose backs
Will take the weight
Of all they need
To build again, anew?
And who will remember
And mourn all the
Freddie Grays
Of the world
Extinguished, voiceless,
Back broken?
And who will speak for them?
And who will listen?
And who will heal
A nation that kills its own?
Tell me when you know.
________________________________________