What Do You Say to a World That Isn’t Listening?

hush your hoarse and cracked voice and write
with a splotchy gel pen, a permanent marker rolling
in the junk drawer, a stolen ballpoint from a doctor’s
office, your favorite fountain pen, dipping it into the
blackest ink.

write until the paper begins to curl inward
from the weight of intensely scratched markings,
write for days even if it means pages are scrawled
with the same sentence a hundred times
like you are trying to memorize. write because
your body is still your own, your life still yours,
write until there are faint engravings
on proceeding blank pages,
because the truth is not dead yet.
write in search of truth.

when pens run dry, reach for pencils.
write until it is so shaved and sharpened
the nib kisses the eraser, a splintering point,
until your fingers become calloused with red
writer’s bumps poking like pomegranate seeds.
write until your wrist aches and the side stretching
from pinky to palm is coated in a dust of lead.

write even when paper disappears
because there are still walls,
barks of trees, sandy shorelines, dirt, and palm.
remember that you write to yourself first
tracing the messages in the cave of your heart,
soft flesh forever remembering before it calcifies.
you will reject, refuse, and resist even
in a fossilized state.
remember you write to add exclamation points
in a universe of ellipses and lazy question marks. 

write remembering what your English teacher taught
about vivid verbs and piercing imagery, about
wielding words like a sword and feather in one.
remembering the weight of every letter and
syllable, how it strikes fear, calls upon creeping
tanks and whirring drones. how
shrieking missiles are sent to silence
simple lines strung together like strings
of beaming light.

write remembering all who came before,
bookmarking their existence into this world.
remembering Phillis Wheatley, who
wrote long after the ship had sailed and anchored.
remembering the Arabic etchings found
in Omar ibn Said’s cell, and Faiz’s search
for true dawn.
write remembering Refaat’s tale.

write to remember.
in the end, there will be a tattered leaflet, a small poem
tucked inside a pillowcase, a wrinkled tissue with bleeding
ink, a crumbling graffitied wall, a page in a book
they tried to burn, and it will be there, written
clear as day, the truth glaring back.

someone will read the sorrow seeping from fingertips
someone will know there was a hair of humanity
pressed between pages when everything was lost,
not all was lost.

truth will be chiseled in stone and skin.
here were the whispered warnings
and bellowing declarations.
here were those who still wrote
to a world that would not listen. 

*your body is still your own, / your life still yours, / because the truth is not dead yet:
translated lines from Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poem, “Bol”