I didn’t sit with the professors and big men with lofty ideas and polished words
I crouched with the woman whose body was ravaged with hunger and hurt
Wounded
I knew nothing of rising levels of stocks and commodities nor of cars and estates
nor the musk of money
The tide I raised my voice against was poverty and violence and the back that turned away from the sight of a lice infected child and her brother’s calloused hands picking through the rubble of broken bits of a dream demolished
I have no language no words to utter than that of anguish and fear, for that rising tide of war and destruction, of might and greed.
I am humbled by my own lowliness,
the inability to stem the squalls of hate,
you swim against the tide they say,
you will drown, they say,
I don’t see the shore nor the fading light only flashes
Flashes of orange and white
and the silence after….
After the silence….
Before the sirens that herald death.