The axe forgets

I know you didn't swing the axe

I know you didn't yell the orders

I know you had nothing to do with

The star studded infantry

And the gold plated cavalry

Raining sticks and fire

Raining fire and sticks

I know you never would have wanted

The screams that ensued

Emanating from the embers

A striking blend between blood red and glorious orange

As if a swarm of banshees that had been prodded all together all too suddenly

Were Producing a discord your ears aren't able to fully comprehend

As it struggles to choose the symphony it wants to hear for itself

You could have mistaken it for laughter

A child cries out for his dead mother as his father tries to carry in his arms the only thing stopping him from jumping into the flames himself

A woman loses her dignity as an emblem carrying man, reduced to a shell containing only his primal heedless impulses pounces upon her, sparing not a sliver about how he will condemn her to a life now stripped of the ability to love someone without having to look over her shoulder

A young girl cradles a day old babe as it's only source of nourishment breathes her last, hunger and famine finally having clawed it's way to her heart, making the stranger promise as she went that she would use the powers of her bosom to keep alive her new world full of promise

A lover pores through a courtyard filled to the brim with the sublime stench of mutilated carrion piled in a myriad of dashed hopes and futile innocence cracked open by the firing of rifles, as he turns over body after body, half hoping that he never finds the one he's looking for, her name dissipating every now and then from his lips

A patriot stands on the shore, watching a school of frigates and schooners recede, their horizon as uncertain as his own as he turns from the ripple filled waters to rebuild his home with a mountain of debris

I know you didn't swing the axe

But this is the root from which our tree stems, a tree we didn't grow

Decorated very well over the years and yet so often you seem to forget

What lies buried in the soil

I suppose it makes you feel unsafe, makes you question the apparently tangled foundations of your stable abode, makes you fear for everything eroding and falling into the nothingness we all come from when the tide shifts again

But you choose to stay

And so do I

The view does look so much better from up here and You're letting me climb after all

Why should I remember

Remembering is painful, it's hard, I don't care how it all came to be as long as I still have the two hands and two feet that let me hold on to the trunk. On the contrary, Looking down could be dangerous

And yet, I can climb all I want but one way or another the wind never seems to want to see my favourable ascent

Never do the branches sway to grant me the privilege of forgetting, oh, how I wish they did

Alas, I turn to the soil again

No, we didn't look like you

Our skin was less pale

We looked to the heavens in different ways

We spoke in tongues that sound strange to you I'm sure

Our fatal mistake however was not thinking first of using these facts

As a reason

But tell me, does that really mean we deserved it?

Tell a child with a scar on his face long enough that he looks dreadful and eventually he will start believing it even though he might have other appeasing features

He'll forget everything but the scar

Worst of all, he'll maybe even forget that you were the one who pushed him head first into the fire

Death still liberates the ones you inflict it upon

But what happens to those who live on

Feeling like their plight is a natural condition

A symptom of their primitivity

Barely can they recognize the voices of their ancestors anymore

Barely can they hear the echo that tried so hard to break from the shackles that attempted to hold the spirit of their resilience

Because their ancestors didn't accept the world they were born in

But As diplomatic pacifists were etched in history as quotable faces and those who gave everything up to fight tooth and nail were caressingly entombed, relegated to just another nameless martyr of an erased revolution

As land and people were bifurcated with imaginary lines created for the silliest of reasons, centuries of history and compassion along with it for the sake of management

As oppressive bureaucracy was inserted into every inch of living, learning and loving and inferiority became an excuse to perpetuate the vicious cycles that gradually seeped into malicious comfort

As "granted" independences were fleetingly celebrated again and again with fabricated allegiances to boxes but people would cease to ever again be truly free

As languages that once sought to liberate voices attached to otherwise restrained bodies were gradually injected with carefully concocted dilutions so that their magnitude never enroached beyond subservience

As we started to choose the stories we would tell and the ones we'd put in time capsules doomed to endure the darkness until a fool like me came around with a shovel

Countries born out of blood would continue to run on blood, but this time they would fail to notice that

The infestation never really went away, it simply became so large that we got accustomed to living with it

I know you didn't swing the axe

Because I know you

And I'm not looking for pity

But I also want you to know

Why you get to start out with a golden spoon

While scrounging for scraps is part of the diurnal schedule someplace else and just getting bread and water a source of radiant smiles

Why children have to be afraid of being killed  because they can't yet be positively labelled by a state

And why so many of us choose to climb the tree and in doing so lose so much of ourselves

Acceptance isn't the same as forgiveness because forgiveness entails resolution but I can never bring myself to hate you

Strangely enough, it's not even because I don't want to but because I know that for better or for worse, my hate will make no difference

After all, ancestry can get you citizenships but not trials in court

If I sound a tad too cynical, maybe it will give you some hope to hear that

Even if things had played out differently I think the world would still largely be the same

At most the coin might be flipped and I might have come out on the other side and even then

I'd like to think that we'd still be friends

I know you didn't swing the axe

But it might have been so much easier if you did