The Weight of Swallowed Voices
Tom Somah
“The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.” Martin Luther King Jr.
Silence settles like dust over dog-eared books, whilst the dead rest in their earned quiet. We, still breathing, cloak ourselves in falseness like graduation gowns and pretend to tend the wound that drains our people dry.
The elders applaud our descent, their weathered hands clapping time to our destruction. "God is in control," they chant. These shepherds, turned mute, swallow their words and call it holy.
Silence thickens in the market stalls where women weave their wares amongst flies, where bread sellers crouch in cluttered drains, where nurses tend the sick in wards that reek of neglect and broken promises.
Silence amongst pastors and imams who trade their calling for political coin.
Silence amongst doctors who pocket medicines meant for the dying.
Silence amongst immigration officers at our airports whose palms grow fat with visa bribes they cannot explain.
Silence amongst army officers who sit beside lawless drivers and watch traffic laws crumble like the roads beneath their boots.
Silence amongst police officers who wave deadly vehicles through for pocket change, blessing broken machinery with raised hands.
Silence amongst lecturers who auction grades while students' futures hang on their parents' desperation.
Silence amongst judges who weigh gold heavier than justice, whose gavels fall on predetermined verdicts, and who are swayed by the allure of power.
Silence heavy as burial shrouds amongst the wrongly condemned.
Silence amongst children whose hands burn from those who walk free.
Silence amongst the living torches we once called neighbors; their screams are now our national shame.
Silence in hospital wards without power, where mothers give birth on broken byways because ambulances exist only in budgets, where nurses tend the sick in wards that reek of neglect and broken promises.
Silence in operating theatres where surgeons work by the weak glow of phone light while
lights burn bright in palace corridors.
We, the living, have swallowed our voices. Forgotten the force of words, the power in speaking truth to those who feast on our silence.
If we cannot voice our own suffering, cannot shed the skin of our complicity in this decay, why do we wonder that the dead keep their secrets of what lies beyond?
The dead have earned their peace. We, the living, have chosen our prison: SILENCE.