I wake up in a strange world.
Where my mind and my money can’t buy me a breath of air. I look at a mirror and it looked back at me to say — Hey! I am mediocre.
I stared back to reply.
I AM NOT HELPLESS. Not anymore.
Our children are fighting for us.
The pages flew in the wind.
We lingered for a heartbeat, a heart beat long
For someone ahead or someone behind
For what is a moment in the stream of time
For today, together we fly.
The binder, the cover, the bookmarks, the glue
They let us out, for they were through.
I had numbers on me
Branded by those, with irons on them
Searing skin, muscle and bone
See, I was free.
Never just one, never two
Or even three or four digits long
Never five, not even six
Not seven or eight or nine.
We all had numbers burnt on us
Like on those who flew in the past
Too long to count like the letter Pi
Too hard to call us by.
But if you looked closely at every eleven that flew
The tenth of us had a zero in the end
For that is how it all began
One at a time
Till there were none.
They told us we were Jews
Gay and gypsies, even Christians new.
Sometimes we fought for our freedom
In Kolyma, Wuhan, Kashmir and Cuba
In the Congo mining for kryptonite
In America for sugar.
Fallen by the leaves
We were cowards and we lied
With tears in our eyes
We pleaded
Yet we tried.
To hurry on our own
And leave in our time
A heartbeat behind
A heart beat long.
Now it was all no more in the past
How we cowered was long forgiven, laid to dust.
As dove after dove we leapt into the blueIn the stream of time,
this is how we flew.
In his exquisite memoir When Breath becomes Air, Paul Kalanithi writes —
You could not help but feel your speck like existence among the immensity of the mountain, the earth, the universe, and yet still feel your own two feet on the talus, reaffirming your presence amid the grandeur.
WE ARE NOT HELPLESS. Not anymore.
There are others fighting for us.
Join us to connect with people fighting for humanity. One mind at a time, raised by the power of nine.