After listening to John Denver’s “I Want to Live”

 

The earth yields enough grain, fat with cattle—
why do we still name countries
by their hunger and their hunger?

We call ourselves family around conference tables
while men in rooms draw lines on maps
that become famines, that become flags.

They carve the world into yes and no,
into deserves to live and deserves to go.
From Somalia’s dust to Syria’s rubble,
from DRC and Myanmar’s forests to Gaza’s streets—
the pattern repeats:
in Ukraine, in Iran, in South Sudan, in Nigeria,
in Palestine, in Mali.
And the wound spreads—
map bleeding into map.

What are we reaching for
if not small things?
A morning without sirens.
Markets where the only shouts
are merchants calling prices.
A grandmother dying in her bed
and not in a ditch
on the road to somewhere else.
A city that remembers its name
for reasons other than rubble.
A child walking to school
and walking home again.

Let them keep their gods and borders.
Let them argue scriptures in halls of stone,
polish their ideologies behind closed doors.
But when their creeds knock on my door
with a sword in one hand and a flag in the other—
I have no faith left for that.

Show me the flag that flies
over full bellies and closed graves.
Not the one that rises
on smoke from the next town over.
Not the one that needs orphans
to prove it is strong.

They call it peace when the guns point outward.
They call it goodness when the dying
happens far enough away
not to stain their shoes.
not to wake their children,
not to ask their names.

We could have built tables long enough
for everyone to sit.
Instead, we built walls
and called it architecture.
We could have made a world
where human was enough.
Instead, we asked for papers,
for proof of birth,
for the right god,
for anything but each other.

When you next wrap your child in blankets,
think of the children running
through streets that used to be homes,
with nothing but smoke in their lungs.

Remember the mothers who count their children
not by who sleeps beside them
but by who made it to sunset.

They are not headlines.
They are not statistics.
They are your mirror.

And the families left in starvation’s slow
hands to die—
one time at a time.

 

 

 

 

 

Photo by Lei Hwang on Unsplash