Tuesday 16 July 2013

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



7 comments:

  1. Very powerful reminder of what we should care about rather than what we allow to waste space in our minds.

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  2. thank you Bill, however i as i mother am enraged about this acquittal and not for racist reasons alone

    why people are allowed to strap on arms like wild wild west and go out looking for trouble is beyond me, must be merikan thing. i know if some assfk came up to my child on street and tried to play authoritarian figure they would get same reaction as Trayvon's and that scares the shit out of me. we should be submissive to any ahole with a gun, fu merikkkan cowboys from hell

    and another nagging question i have is, if every merikan is allowed to pack heat and call it standing your ground when in public then what is this stop and frisk bs about? or only white merikans can pack a side arm ???


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  3. They are all my children. They are all my sons, all my daughters. All my people, all my lands. Right now I am focused on one, but I am able to keep the rest in mind and work as best I can for the demise of evil.

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  4. Bill, Thanks for that. Honestly, even knowing how racist America is, the verdict was a real shock. And as for the 'stand your ground' gun laws, it's understood that they are just a license to kill Black people. As you point out, America now has a license to kill everywhere in the world.

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  5. Words fail me regards this verdict. Not guilty on ALL counts. Really? Not even guilty of the very minor offence of discharging a firearm within the city limits?
    In the country where I live, or try to, the same country where I and my Dad were born, we both served honorably in the militaries of this country even. There is NO true justice in this failed state today. 'Merikkka and its supreme leader, the drone king are fast becoming a total police state. The old hands of the East German Stasi could only dream of the spy system the (ig)Nobel piece prizident has in place.
    The old Constitutional Republic that once WAS America has devolved into 'merikkka. And we, the people of this "nation" have allowed this. Shame on me, shame on us all. Delete this if you must Bill. I do not want to cause any harm to you or your site.
    Please, everybody, we need to try every day to treat ALL life as we wish to be treated. We may never know true peace, but, we can still dream. And, we can sure as hell try to work for that elusive peace and justice for all.

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  6. Bill,
    Please forgive my bad manners of my latest post to you. I forgot to thank you for your post/poem regards Trayvon Martin.
    Thank you sir. Thank you very much.

    ReplyDelete

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