What would you tell me if I let you speak?
Would I recognise my voice in yours?
I refuse to let you represent the worst that
Happened. Who were you then? You didn’t
Know that you had to defend yourself.
You weren’t taught how. Actually, you were taught
Defencelessness, how to let yourself be besieged,
That you are someone to possess, a body to claim,
And they tried to strip you of your name,
And slowly, you wondered, why your own laurels
Would never make it towards your own head.
What would I say to you? Did someone give us a choice?
I don’t want to say you died, or were murdered, it doesn’t
Feel like that and yet I’m mourning, you’re out of my hands,
That seemed inevitable. Did you become a burden, too heavy,
With your entire being stuck in the past, dragging me back too?
There was a time when I clothed you in darkness, disengaged,
And refused to stand by your side and listen. I registered your voice,
What it said, where your finger pointed, and I felt that the truth
Cost you your life, I ran from one to the other, finding out who
I was and wasn’t, reminiscence, ashes, blood pumping, in memoriam.
How alone have you been? Were you even aware that you never had been?
Or were you the first to be disembodied? Replaced, cut short, redirected into
A nothingness that I accepted when I had been too weak to speak up for us
And what you tried to tell me, about yourself, about us, why we pretend to
Smile even though we are falling apart, why we put on a good show and
No one applauds who we really are, that we survived what happened to us.
That’s not what they want to hear, that’s not what they want to know,
And you looked them in the eyes, and they shut them as tightly as they could
And you lost my hand, lost faith in the world, but I came back, I’ve seen you for
A long time now, we share the same roots and there’s life, there always will be.
Croque-Melpomene 