Lines Across Our Eyes

Terrorizing times stretched across our lives,

Times when one should see, feel and learn.

 

“We see those lines across our eyes,

The very lines that kill’d our lies and dreams.”

 

We were made to slide across steel,

To feel the smoothness of gravity’s pull;

All until we were impaled at the foot

Of the glistening face of reality.

 

Promises, made to make a change,

(That) won the votes and won the war.

They did all things just like the waves,

They simply forgot to keep their charges safe.

 

We were marched into the silent cells,

With cloth balled up into our mouths

And tape pasted across our lips.

They locked the pins inside our nails

And watched our bodies writhe like dolls.

 

“The pain lasts just as long as you’re alive,

They showed us that death is the only escape.”

 

We speak and shout against them, hoping to defer;

We weren’t wrong, they were right all along.

They surround us at a lonely hour

And escort us off our very porch.

 

They race past the Freedom statue,

They throw us into the prisons of Libertad.

 

And when finished, they chopped us neat

And dropped the bodies (weighted) into the sea.

Sometimes a hand washed ashore,

Sometimes the others raised a finger –

Only to disappear without the sign of a fight.

 

The ones who chose not to fight

Lived a life of futile oblivion.

Eyes saw the coup, the terror and the torture;

They sealed their lips – everything was just fine.

 

The time they fell, with the cultured brains,

They had the merest of words to say –

“As to what he did and what she had to pay,

We know not his fate, our hands are cleaned by the rains.”

 

*******

 

The sun rises in another land,

A boy wonders if he’ll see a million minutes of peace.

He turns to see the blades of a windmill slice

Through a passing dove in perfect silence.