It’s hard to fight in silence,
when nobody knows it.
You feel like a nearby grave that doesn’t recognize its neighbors,
like a crushed car left empty in the street.
I thought our broken hearts were contagious,
I thought they were unreplaceable and that never repeat like the clinching sound of a virgin tree.
We fight battles each and every day,
but still embrace “a luta continua” as a slogan.
The sun sinks into clouds so yellow,
and our hope too sinks into the stagnant flood of poverty.
We are the blind helping each other cross busy roads,
where cars crisscross, collide and crash.
We’re children abandoned in a den of lions,
that become carcasses of hungry scavengers.
Yellow clouds lingering in a blue sky,
and how can you be so hurt, surprised like the pharaoh who ignored the ten plagues?
My hopes fly high in the sky, on a kite that holds my heart in its paper hand,
lightly drawing lines on thin air.
As death and malnutrition sweep through our communities of innocent children,
we keep holding on because when the night falls, and later the new dawn rises,
we can thank the Almighty, for at least, we aren’t rotting in a graveyard.
23 February, 2023
