Suddenly a cry flew
out of nowhere, like the lash of a whip,
piercing and sharp,
waking us from a troubled sleep —
furious —
“Tell me, have you all gone mad?
Giving up on all this?
Just like that, despairing already,
Without a real fight?”
“Leave us alone,” we said.
“Let us withdraw into our heads
to mourn our dead
until this thing passes away
that no words can portray.
We are like mutes beneath the weight of its pain,
before the horrors of our hostages.
So let us be, just be,
without understanding, without thinking,
until our looted land, our trampled land,
our raped land
stops hurting.”
For a moment the lights flailed.
For a moment the tunnels wailed.
The world was black and white.
The world was coal and ice.
In the middle of the night we got up to flee,
my wife, my son, and me
I bore the cry on one shoulder
and the hope on the other,
numbed and put under.
“How much more can we go on like this”
my wife whispered,
so that the boy wouldn’t hear
and be struck by fear.
“Our high-tech filled the world with awe
we were the start-up nation —
but it turns out we had a flaw,
we were just the warm-up band