In the 400th year Bound to lend their tears to the mortar Their bone and nail to the brick When the sound of their mother-tongue compelled Scrubbed and raw legislation that bathed Rabid violence into love of country Baptizing citizens’ hands after They tossed innocents into the mouths of crocodiles After they looked through the wailing women As through the spaces between reeds I wonder Did the mothers and sisters sing psalms and hymns Did the words cotton in their throat Did joyful trust gather Like sloughed old skin and spit, lining their mouths Did they clutch their bellies before they sat in ashes And think of the ghosts of their wombs Did they grieve the birthing stool The helpless cycle The fruit of their blood and labor turned strange Split, limp, and soggy In the 400th year Did they go hoarse or numb Did they remember the Lord’s name When prayer became as absurd as birthing baby boys with any joy How many wailing women bent brick-baking Because mourning, for them, was illegal How many sisters watched a tiny hand bob to the river’s surface Silently, because survival meant cultivating A controlled response to massacre Murderers can be fragile How many did they bury in the sands As generations slipped into ancestry What was freedom to them What good would it do to worship The One who left them there to be hunted, worked, reviled What volume could amplify their rage at God’s abandonment Their mother-tongue already silenced by their oppressors and the Nile Because God stared at the wailing women As through the spaces between reeds How did they love and lay and carry and labor What did they say What did they do For God to finally hear
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Words fail me, so please let me say that I see you, and I weep with you.