Freedom is not free for everyone

Pulkita Anand

Alas, and was I born for this, to wear this brutish chain?

                                                      George Moses Horton

Freedom is not free for everyone

And those who have it don’t understand it

It neither comes in charity

Nor gifted

You need to buy it

(though you are not able to buy it in your own currency)

You need to earn it

(though you never learnt to earn it)

It’s preciously priceless

It takes a lot of stories, houses, families,

Blood, suffering, sweat,

Debris, death…

To bring it…

It comes by falling.

(Like caged birds falling in the cage)

To create it…

It is created by the destruction.

It is a shiny star that’s afar

It’s a land that is in dreams

It’s a dream that throbs the soul

What freedom means only caged birds know…..

The Oil Slick

 Linda N. Masi

Wading through the mangrove swamp

I saw the shoal of dead blue tilapia

Floating in the oil slick—

A testament of Big Oil’s foot 

In the Niger Delta swamps.

I reached out a hand to one fish

And touched 

Its oily, slimy, scaly skin,

Feeling the eternal stillness, hearing

The deafening cry of quietness—

No jostle, no ka-plum, 

Not even the yewk-yewk

Of the osprey

Soaring and scanning the waters

For fish.

Just quietness.

With their mouths half open,

Filled with filmy water, and

Their oil slick coated scales

Reflecting dark rainbows

To the setting sun,

They look at me with little

Beady black eyes.

And when I shut my eyes in sleep, or

Open them in vague dreams

I still see the same shoal of tilapia

Floating there in the oil slick,

Floating there in the quietness.