The Witness

It is a strange world you live in. But do I blame you for it?

It is not your fault that cosmic matter fell upon this Mother you call Earth and reshaped itself into bodies, experiencing life through different lenses.

Yesterday, I was a leaf, carried too far north. I landed on a war ground.

I felt bullets slice the air above me, missiles tearing through the sky. And I wondered how beings who claim to love the Earth could destroy it just because it had been divided by names. 

By borders. 

By water and soil. 

By language and color and tone.

They forget they are made of the same dust. They breathe the same air. They stand on the same ground.

They share one planet. And still, they choose to destroy it.

Bomb by bomb, the screams rose from the tragedy. Limbs scattered. Cries stretched thin across the smoke. Little children calling for mama and papa–guardians, I think you call them.

In a moment, innocence was stripped bare.

I was stained red, then brown, then black. Flames swallowed the land and the little boy beside me. His body lay still as the fire consumed us both.

I became ash. Debris. A witness to a war I never understood.

Today, I am a bird.

I rise above your world and see the Mother in her fullness; and her wounds. I see places once vibrant with unimaginable colors now dulled into silence. Life turned to something unrecognizable.

I am unable to understand how a civilization has chosen to kill themselves gradually in the name of evolution. You call this evolution, but it looks like decay.

You tear at the Mother to keep the child alive, forgetting the cord is still attached. Kill the Mother, and you’ve killed the child. .

I land where the soil is dark and rich, yet “rich” has been stolen from the mouths of its people. A people once auctioned like objects by their kind, their skin broken, and heritage murdered. A people who fought to be free.

Now, they wear the chains themselves.

They were blinded once by their oppressors and they’ve chosen to keep the blindfold on. Is it fear? Memory? 

Is it quiet comfort of forgetting who they used to be when they were free?

I take flight again.

This time, I land in the land of freedom; where freedom takes a backseat and its people are moved like pieces on a board.

Protect the king, they say.

Protect him until everyone else falls, and the king stands alone, unable to save even himself.

Tomorrow, I will become one of you. I will live as you live.

But before that, I will return to where I came from.

I have seen enough.

You are not strangers to beauty, you are simply careless with it.

It is a strange world you live in.

And I am not sure it deserves to be called living.