Trayvon Martin

You argue about what might have

Happened, or did not –

You fight over what a judge

Jury, a prosecutor

Should or should not have done

 Who is racist, who isn’t.

And meanwhile

Cannibal headhunters terrorise the towns

Of Syria, torturing and looting;

Car bombs blow apart

Iraqi schools and markets

The drumbeat of ten years

Of liberation.

And meanwhile

Heroes hide in airports

While evil empires try to hunt them down –

Or rot naked in jail cells,

Because  

Just telling the truth about the way things are

Is heroism now.

And meanwhile

Girls in Pakistan are shot

For falling in love,

Villagers in India are jailed and killed

For not giving up their lands for mines

For daring to ask to be treated as people

And not as things.

And meanwhile

Drones stalk the skies above

Afghan weddings and Yemeni mosques

Killing teenagers because of who their fathers are;

Piloted by freedom warriors half a world away

Killing on a suspicion

Death on a whim.

And meanwhile

Poisons pour from factory chimneys

Forests turn to slag, icecaps melt

Rivers wither and grasslands die

And the sullen seas rise to swallow the land.

And meanwhile

Earth is still a ball of rock, turning, turning

Round a minor sun on an outer spiral arm

Of just another unexceptionable galaxy,

And the time will come

When it will be a cinder hanging

In an incandescent cloud of cosmic gas.

Where will be your argument then

Of what the judge and jury should have said

Or the prosecutor done?

Copyright B Purkayastha 2013