The Wind

This village now is silent.
More silence than I, for myself ever heard before,
With nothing other than the wind, to make her signature across a dirt floor,
And me in the middle of meh front door, waiting like a fool for something to make sense again.
Silence as the ancestors bathe themselves in ashes,
Bitter tears, screaming in an infinite anguish, but still…silence.
Silence as the land swallows the blood of those who lived,
Of those who died here.
Here where these rebels come on horse-back,
Their skin was too, but ours were the darker of the two blacks,
Not armed with atomic weapons, or sophisticated machine guns,
But with machetes, knives, blades and clubs,
And a dark greed hovering above
their consciences…thaz if God did make them with any at all.
So I sit here on the earthen floor,
Hands squeezed between my knees,
Just as my thoughts are compressed into forgetting hope.
Then as though to mock meh, I feel a slight breeze,
Coming as a gentle reminder of things not so gentle.
The dust here rises, circles, and rests again,
With the years of this soil, swallowing the ambitions of our men and women, …and children…our children.
Dead.
History taking us hostage, but who to pay the ransom?
Our days to be stalked by these merciless phantoms, fantasizing daily about,
Virtual cash - flowing below our bare feet,
Forming thick black rivers that all anxiously meet
At the intersection of foreign investments and human life,
Economic development and human life.
Human greed and human life.
Our lands are fertilized -
With these bodies, bones and blood,
Until these too are forgotten and they become fossils to flood
This entire continent.

-By Arielle John copyright 2007