My People

My People

My People

Snared by nostalgia
reduced to an absolute past

o my people
how shall I save you?

Your faces reduced to eyes
that flicker from the dark

oppression of forgetting.
How shall my remembering

have the means to oppose
the sublime tyranny of time?

How my treasures
are buried with your being

beneath the rubble of memory.
Your name is a whimper

a history reduced to a sigh
beneath the mess of earthquakes,

revolutions and wars.
Your ancient tongue an elegy

at the funeral of belonging.
No, I can’t save you

but place, once in a while
my freshest rose at the mausoleum

of your name, o my family.
And as the phases of my loneliness

wane towards a dark moon
I shall erect memorials

for the songs of your fading eyes
in the lands of annihilation.