From the Archives: 27 November 2014
Michael Brown
He died somewhere far away
and I only came to know when I stumbled upon
the picture of his mother on my computer screen:
a single tear frozen as it was about to roll down,
her eyes muted by the shock
as she stood unaware of the camera that projected her sorrow all over the globe.
Eyes would scan and minds would concentrate , or perhaps pass her by in apathy.
He died somewhere in Missouri
and I flipped through the pages of history
to find the cause that brought about
this catastrophe.
Caught up in the irreverence of a historic antipathy
which a century of resistance could not reverse
in a land that was possessed by diverse cultures
before the land could give them the language of a common ancestry.
It is by an absurd logic that we come to this world
and before we can make any sense of our life
we are thrown into the battlegrounds of our isolated struggles.
Images of lives blown apart,
Cameras swirling all around,
conflicting parables of the right and the wrong,
whisk away the youth before it reaches the precarious adolescence.
The world is being handed down
in the simple binary categories of 'Us' and 'They',
The battle-lines are drawn , furious and blind, with a decisive fatality and a dark force; it's always the young whose blood is spilled
as the mothers die in agony.
Fear and cowardice grips all.
Whatever has happened may not happen to my kins,
because I am on this side of the fence, one may say;
though the heart knows the wheel of fortune turns.
The eyes on all sides view the moment
with a silent and fearful prayer.
The mind in its moment
of unspeakable paranoia
gathers analogies around.
History, wake up, will you?
Erase your past and sow a different seed
for your own children, the batons of new humanity!
Michael Brown
He died somewhere far away
and I only came to know when I stumbled upon
the picture of his mother on my computer screen:
a single tear frozen as it was about to roll down,
her eyes muted by the shock
as she stood unaware of the camera that projected her sorrow all over the globe.
Eyes would scan and minds would concentrate , or perhaps pass her by in apathy.
He died somewhere in Missouri
and I flipped through the pages of history
to find the cause that brought about
this catastrophe.
Caught up in the irreverence of a historic antipathy
which a century of resistance could not reverse
in a land that was possessed by diverse cultures
before the land could give them the language of a common ancestry.
It is by an absurd logic that we come to this world
and before we can make any sense of our life
we are thrown into the battlegrounds of our isolated struggles.
Images of lives blown apart,
Cameras swirling all around,
conflicting parables of the right and the wrong,
whisk away the youth before it reaches the precarious adolescence.
The world is being handed down
in the simple binary categories of 'Us' and 'They',
The battle-lines are drawn , furious and blind, with a decisive fatality and a dark force; it's always the young whose blood is spilled
as the mothers die in agony.
Fear and cowardice grips all.
Whatever has happened may not happen to my kins,
because I am on this side of the fence, one may say;
though the heart knows the wheel of fortune turns.
The eyes on all sides view the moment
with a silent and fearful prayer.
The mind in its moment
of unspeakable paranoia
gathers analogies around.
History, wake up, will you?
Erase your past and sow a different seed
for your own children, the batons of new humanity!
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