We are taught to see Eurocentric patriarchal history as victorious.
Governments call people to war usually for conquest, resources, vanity in self serving justification.
Masses of soldiers come forward to fight, die or be wounded; families held hostage.
Those that have fallen, suffered due to the chess games of the powerful;
We remember.
But is continuous violence the answer?
Carnage:
There are imprints on the land;
Of grief and pain.
I see this, feel this, hear the tears,
sometimes.
It overwhelms me.
It took me until my teens to realize everyone
else didn’t feel the
Agony of others;
Past, Present, Future…
It’s in the cities.
I could not bear the frustration and
anger
Imparted unknowingly.
I wore the pathos of children’s lives,
Unable to thrive in daily fear;
Too acutely in my heart.
Tears in my body, tears in my art.
Over the plains one day
I just started to cry for hours,
Fragments of feeling left on the land.
Filled me with mourning…
Ghosts of beautiful people, animals..
A land now devoid of life.
For even shrubs cannot grow in grief.
These silent emotions,
I know them as my own.
I can almost touch the transparent
memories
That are so real to me.
How can others not perceive?
It is so loud, so clear;
This song of sorrow.
Because these imprints
Unfelt by many,
Still sleep in the unconscious
And filter into lives unknowingly,
To harm us all.
Just to verbalize, record
This is what went weeping
In despair…
Those unswift deaths;
Lives that were stolen,
By history celebrating conquest.
That caused such human suffering
Fresh and old;
Blood still lies on the land.
In the strokes of human gain,
People died and survived a terrible
pain.
Now all over our suffering earth
Our Mother World grieves
As I do.
And anyone that can hear this carnage
still;
Speaking so loudly in silence.
T.Truesdale copyright 1998
