The Rohingya – A People Brutalised.
The deadened eyes scream, lashing out at our mute consciences,
the numbed faces cry out, tearing at our complicit deafness,
the streaming tears slice deep, slitting our accursed inaction,
the haunting faces of human suffering, tearing at our indifference,
the wailing children remind us, of a real evil that stalks this world.
The peacemakers, the nobel laureates, the impotent powers that be,
turn the other way, sewing their eyes shut, feigning not to see,
the misery that stalks the Rohingya, each brutal night, and every horrific day.
Where are the howls of protest,
Where are the voices of indignation?
Where are all of us, staring at this festering wound, septic and dripping with pus?
We live in a world of wretched hypocrisy, where pain and suffering abominably leers,
as we turn our heads, neglecting genocide,
unless it happens to ‘our’ people, and not to ‘theirs’.
The Rohingya stare deep into each and every soul, their eyes tunnelling into our inert shame,
while we argue passionately about the results of last night’s football game.
We are complicit, all of us to a person, having failed to be human once more,
stuttering words like these that I write, while into flesh unspeakable horrors tear and tore.
We are nothing, all of us, we are no longer human, as we drink and eat merrily, basking in our own closeted cells,
while tears of mothers, of fathers, of sons and of daughters, overflows reeking wells.
Where are the good people of this world, where are the voices so loud to proclaim, where are the obscenely wealthy countries,
cowardly silent,
as an entire people are brutalised, and savaged till they sink to their blistered knees.
The poet Erich Fried, who endured the savagery of the Nazis, wrote this …
” it happened, it happens, and it will go on happening, unless something is done to stop it from happening “.
It is happening now.
It will continue to happen, unless something is done to stop it from happening.
Now. Today.
Scribbled Verse 