Fruits of Hate and Love

We trek the path littered with corpses of our past and present. We tread gingerly around the bleeding flesh, we hold our breath for the putrefying odour overpowers us.

We yearn for the poetry of our childhood, which turned to ashes in our mouth in our youth. We look to the distant stars of the dark night and hope that our tears would dry up before we are bled of all our love.

The tune that our bodies once swung to in bliss has faded from Music. Our limbs feel the searing heat and fall with tiring regularity on the sodden soil. The soil which died when the blossoms faded.

With knowing eyes we survey our fellow travellers and wonder if there is any love at all in the world we once thought we knew. We wonder at the futility of the next step, but the feet walk on.

We look at the corpses hanging with the mangoes and ask if we are more alive than them. Young women they once were, now they have putrefied in the summer heat, and mingle with the odour of the mangoes.

Mother, don't stop singing your lullaby, not today, for your daughters cannot smile without danger. Don't stop, the tears are not yet full of steaming anger.

The fog is too thick to see past the corpses littering our path. Yet, there is hope and a dream, a snatch of a song carried back to us from the people who will learn to dance without a bloodthirst in an orchard with fruits of our love hanging ripe upon the trees.