2. Cry, My Beloved City!

My heart bleeds as the fundamentalists cheer...
religion notwithstanding.

All they care for are those ghettoed votes,
for blood is the wine of their lord,
and our flesh he seeks...
at the altar of politics,
shall my fellow man offer his sacrifice.

Green was the grass once,
now the land is red;
littered with corpses,
mangled bodies that once carried a name;
families stranded,
as their bread-earners bake in the heat of political battles;
fought on my homeground,
Why, gods of my people, why?

As words go unheeded,
temples unbuilt,
people who lived,
to dust some turn and others to gutter-silt,
just as the mosques that lived there before them;
and the dirt that rules...

Cry, my beloved city, cry!