While I wept

Where were you while I mourned? 

I wept alone while you laughed gaily

My heart broke and I wept, where were you?

Why didn’t you share my grief?

I cried for 30 years, others for much longer

My grief is not fresh, it's always been there for all, 

No matter their colour or creed

And then September came with its terrible purpose

And I mourned again, I mourned with you and felt your grief

Stood transfixed as horror fell upon horror

And while I mourned, I saw your anguish

Then I saw your hate, a lust to be sated with foreign blood. 

Who did that? you asked. Then followed a clown as he pointed the way 

To your erstwhile pet, now your devil. 

Have we not been here before?

And the world shuddered, wary and well-used to your reckless stupidity

Ham-fisted politics unravelling the fragile new world we were just getting used to,

A world with less fear, less paranoid, more hopeful, 

A light we could now see after so long a night

Man coming of age, Justice now arriving

Stopped in its tracks.

Our new world unravelled, a dark age returned by whose choice?

Theirs with their unrepeatable challenge? No.

Yours with your well-worn retort

They won when you replied

As they knew you would,

As they wanted you to. 

Not before.

A vacancy in the ghost department, filled for another 30 years

By your protégés and their acolytes

Have we not been here before?

As you do your best to create their new army

The world decides. 

Are thanks in order?

For your new age of terror?

Where are you now as I mourn?

The dead sacrificed to save your soldiers, 

Men of war, paid to fight and die have higher price 

Than peasants scratching dry earth for their living

I have more tears and I will mourn when you would rather I stopped

I will grieve for those you hope I will forget

And tomorrow....

Where will your tears go tomorrow, when more suffer?

When farmers lose their livelihoods

Entire countries, who cannot feed their own because your excess grain

Cheaper than it cost to grow, is dumped so none can sell their own

And woe betide the governments that refuse

Where will your tears go?

For the new victims I will cry 

And you will wish that I would stop

And I will wish that you would stop.

When will you stop?

For God’s sake, stop.

November 2001

Sahr O Fasuluku