Comrades Don’t Die, They Multiply.
For all the dreams of dark-skinned men,
women and children,
scorched and stumbling on blistered feet.
For the nameless and numbered,
who were butchered like meat
with the sky growling thunder
and whose napalmed screams were silenced.
I offer you this hymn.
For the guns of defiance
and lips that curse…
for the peasants who barefoot
walk proud on the earth.
Hacked by machetes
and consumed in fire
or hung from trees
like electric wires of resistance!
I offer you this humble hymn.
Though death be persistent,
one truth stays consistent in this song of our lament:
we may be cut down,
but we will always return,
like weeds through the cement.
(The People’s Tribune, June, 2008)
