Same Difference

Suppression

BOOM.

That’s the way it sounds
When freedom flees
From sidewalks
Crowds roaring in agony
….the sudden cold
Frightening children
Into the folds of mothers skirts.

BOOM!

Is the way it used to sound back home
When tanks came rolling into schoolyards.
All the young men (still trailing clouds of innocence)
Turned soldiers
Face so twisted
Sisters couldn’t recognize them.

I was never there
When cousins shot
Uncles and
Brothers turned
Their own mothers
Into the soldiers.
Nieces laying decapitated
At every fork on the road.

I didn’t see
The children
from those days, when
Death as familiar
As soccer games.
When they
Fed dogs
Limbs of
Someone
They vaguely knew…

BOOM

Went the
Tiles on ceilings
And everyone
Fell face first into floors.

Bullets
Whistling.
And someone
Cried

…someone always cries…when the shots ring.

And that’s how it was
that day
In the park.
Minus the blood
And lost
Lives.

But spirits
Still buckled
To the thunder
Of uniformed men.

And bodies still fell at the same angle
Howling in the same humiliated pain

BOOM.

The boots
Met flesh
Like in those days
And someone ran
And for a minute
Alvarado Street
Looked
Like the dirt road
On the side
Of Rio De Jalponga

And life
Was as fragile
As a held breath.

BOOM

In an instant
We became
What we fled
From.

And I wasn’t there
That day in May
Or back in
The times
of our civil war

But I have seen
The faces…
And the silence
That comes
With their fear.

And I now know that
BOOM.

Go the eardrums
One last time
Before the silence
Settles

On my people.