The city is burning brother
And all the buildings in it
And all the souls in it too

The forest is burning sister
And all the trees in it
And all the souls in it too

The heart is freezing
From the stain
Of what we’ve made.
The heart is cracking
Lost pieces float in emptied space

The filthy man on the street is your brother
The looting soldier is your baby sister
The man who bulldozed the trees is your mother
The starving child is your son
The one who turned away is you

This grief runs oceans deep
For what we have done
To ourselves.
The cruelty and the shame
Slices, sears the heart.
This stain darks the sky.
We look away
And rip our hearts out
Each and every day

We tumble in the coma of our grief
Absence echoes through the aching
Chambers of the heart
“I” we say
“You” we say
We cannot —do not say
“We”

We are lying in the alleyway bleeding out
We lose our family in a bomb attack
We are drowning refugees
We are burned out of our hostel
We are swimming in a poisoned lake
We are trafficked girls and we are soldiers
We are colonialists and slaves
We are captains of industry
We are tech billionaires
We are lying stealing
We are sleeping

We the people
Are the people
We

Time now.
We are waking up
Singing ourselves home
Feeling screeching grief
And the solid pulse of every living thing
We are grieving
We are crying crawling standing
With our brothers, sisters, planet
With ourselves

Come then,
Let us begin

—

Written by Deirdre Gleeson