A Human Rights Poem for Blog Action Day 2013

Seeing What Cannot Be Seen

(A Human Rights Poem for Blog Action Day 2013)

Squadrons of government

soldiers in riot gear,

massed and ready

behind the white man

confronting the forest man,

looking

for any reason

to begin firing,

nation of mothers, fathers,

children, grandfathers,

grandmothers, The People,

behind the forest man,

their bodies,

their voices,

their stories all

outside the shot,

the forest under fire,

fields of burning stumps,

dead bodies, murdered chiefs

laying in their graves,

violated treaties,

stinking mines,

cattle ranches worked

by Indian slaves,

missing children,

dying animals,

all these are

what cannot be seen

in the photograph,

nor the citizen journalist

aiming the camera,

nor the face

of the blog writer

who published the picture,

or that of the Global Voices

online editor who reported

the report

of  the last

on the rain forest Indians

taking to the streets

to save their land,

to save their lives, nor

the face

of the forest man

willing

to die rather than step aside

for the bulldozers

because without the forest

he will die anyway,

we cannot see ourselves

in the picture

until now.