A Song for Liberty

Hand me a rock where I can lodge my podium

and raise my voice for those hearts that have gone silent.

For the hungry children on the callous streets of this city;

desperate and lost without a soul to bear their plight, but shifty handlers.

Let me speak for our Kindred up north; defaced with figures and statistics

by countless packs of hyenas gnashing their teeth at their suffering,

feeding off the carcass of their dead. Anxiously waiting for their living to join.

Let me speak for the peasant laborer trapped in a labyrinth;

birthed by fate on the wrong side of the table,

so he must toil by an angry sun for a meal only fit for rats.

Let me speak for the peasant farmer with a broken hoe,

bedeviled by shy rains and merciless merchants. Left to live

a life of frugal existence at the bottom of an endless food chain.

Let me speak for the proletariat with a black tie and white shirt,

walking numeral units of distance to a sterile workplace

where he is paid just enough to keep him dependant on the system .

I raise my voice, yes, for if those that must speak shall not,

Who then shall hear the wails of our heads beating against the walls?

From where shall the wind that will carry the rage of their muted cries blow?

If I must write, how then shall I write about love in a drowning world

where men are drenched in apathy and self-absorption.

How can I write about nature or its searing beauty amid the filth

of an impassive lot comfortable enough with the waste they live in

Where shall I find the clever metaphors and fancy parodies to write

to a mindless audience too shallow to appreciate them,

when all I want to ask is why?

Why they sit around with putrid ease like spectators in a Roman coliseum,

watching the pillage of their fellow human beings cheered on by their guiltless silence?

How am I to find the creativity of expression in this distortion

when after fifty centuries of human existence

fathers rape daughters and brothers kill brothers while we sit by and watch?

I speak for those who cannot speak, not because I am a better man,

but because every war has its weapon, and mine a noisy pen.

I speak these things, not because I haven’t any of my own to speak of

but because it would be a shame if woods went silent

when all the tress were being cut down.

© 2009