Freedom

The need for freedom , you tell me, is vital
for the poor, the erstwhile downtrodden
who carry a burden of the past
on their backs as well a on the minds.
You came here to exploit
and sublimated your acts and deeds
under the blanket term:
"a civilizing mission".
Like a drug we swallowed the sugar-coated pill
and the sluggish laggards that we were,
we lay asleep for more than a century. The amnesia worked.
And now after one more century has elapsed,
racism, xenophobia still active, on one side a history of the past regimes
of high culture and imperialism,
on the other side a drunkenness of newly acquired taste for power,
it's a precarious balance between the need for peace and the hunger for a retribution.
The one-time winners talk about the need for the other
to forget the slavery of the past,
because the pursuit of civilized life requires, they say,
that we forget the past.
And that is true even if both have reasons of their own for that.
For the colonized minds, unless they learn to forget
life will turn into an endless quest for revenge.
Civilization cannot be built just on forgetting.
Not only must we learn to forget,
we must also not forget to learn

The Land Is Widowed

THE LAND IS WIDOWED
A long way to go
in very small steps
and while in a corner of the globe the farm lands crack
for droughts
in another corner the land is scorched by fire and cannon.
Here, I do not own the land
I borrow loans to cultivate a piece of land I do not own.
Droughts, no crops for three consecutive years,
loans , more loans and the interest kills, then a marriage in the family
and I have to spend when there is not a penny to send my child to school.
I borrow another big sum which I know I can't repay.
And then the country liquor, my last refuge.

And the rest of the story is told by the widow.
"One day he drowned himself and I could get no help from the government
because on autopsy report he was found heavily drunk when he drowned himself and died.

The land is widowed.

Extracting Forgiveness

Extracting forgiveness out of a tormented person
after you scorch one with venom and malice
is no less than a humiliation cast of a defeat.
The one who forgives, realizes too late,
that it is the other name of a defeat.
The one who asks for forgiveness, does it to the gallery,
a sad truth which the naive one who forgives, fails to see,
smothered by the cries of lament of the other, and half dead by the blows received, the act of the forgiveness will go soon into shadows as the applause to the one who seeks forgiveness will go on rising  making someone deaf at last.
The wiles are worthy of a laurel.
A gift of great grandiosity
which the one who forgives will never forget.
God, when he created fairies,
forgot to equip them with the tenacity to fight.
He sends them with a stern warning:
"You are there for a purpose.
You can do nothing else but sing and die and come back to me."

A Flower Of Adversity

Fear was naturalized as she was born;
it came with her innocence as a gift.
Surrender was another name
for a way of life.
She knew what to fear before she knew what she liked.
Her little lips curled not in a smile,
but in a sorrowful appeal.

But a spark of reflection
shone in her eyes,
a spark that watched.
Even as her hands rose above her head,
it was not in the abject act of submission to might.
There was a language that her body spoke
without any schooling in rebellion.
some instinct taught her
to tighten her fists,
She knew how to preserve her precious self.
She is a bud that will bloom in adversity.

冯晨 originally shared:

The scared 4-year-old Syrian girl surrendered to a photojournalist's camera she thought was a weapon.