Divided fields and Oil Towns
for Bori, 1995
What is left of the massacre neatly folded
behind your koboko-whipped back. As the
world goes by, the crackdown replacing
everything next to it, as though this grief
would push us away from the creek.
Somehow you always find me. You walk
out from your bedroom and you walk into
my mouth. The low intensity war and the
continuum of violence. There is courage in
your eyes; there is defiance in your voice.
There is the stubborn refusal to give the
last word to bullies and their sponsors.
And the deserted farmlands noticed what
else is missing: your trauma and their acts
of battery; I mean how you were held hostage
and repeatedly raped in that darken village
church. It’s like that. The past and the present.
Not backward or forward. And then, you rise
through the open threshold; determined not
to wallow in self-pity, from the things that
call to us as it must have once call to you.