You can taste the starved love
Rubbing the sleepy genocide eyes
Of tiny children
With history pinned inside
Their orphaned clothes
They scan the puffy gray skies
For beet soup and boiled dumplings
As if they and their families know
To never stop
Flashing the blue and yellow
Flag as they foot-race soccer balls
Into bombed-out schools
Tomorrow these un-sheltered people speak once more:
We fight
For freedom and for peace
We fight
Against rape and slavery and holocaust
Hate
May be unguided weapons
Lighting our grandmothers’ dresses on fire
Hate
May be guns and tanks
Spraying the oppressor’s blood at our muddy ankles
But as long as we have breath
From noses made clear by sunflowers
As long as we can walk
Or crawl
Like baptized nightingales swinging bandaged arms
And as long as fear is a prison train
We must liberate
With the muscular African shadow of Mandela
We will survive
We will win
We will survive
We will win
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