The first quarter

Strange

Weather and Signs

In the water floating

Elian

Elian

Gonzalez

Miracle

Child

Asleep

Floating

Signifier.

Sole survivor.

Plucked from the dividing waters

Chosen sign!

Chosen to stand for children

The pawns in the spiral of greed, hate, war

Child Victims of War, victims of Love withheld!

Morning Song

We set love free!

we set love free today.

And

In the evening

Children played in peaceful fields of green.

Elian, Elian, Elian Gonzalez

You shall dance and you shall sing again!

Another Black Man Down

Amadou, Amadou Diallo?

Where is your griot now?

Where are the praise songs in your memory?

Whose heart shall keep you in perfect peace?

Shall the millennium say only this of you, Amadou.

'Just another blackman down!

Drowned in a hail of bullets

As greed and hate and war walk free

Again!

Floating

A Black man?

Black men.

A Black woman?

Black women.

Black child?

Black children of the Limpopo.

Countless Black bodies going

 

down

 

slipping down

 

floating

round

and

around

drowning

drowned

burdened

rivers

rivers

bursting

bursting

banks

banks

overtaking

taking over lives

lives

 

hanging

 

clinging

 

dripping

 

hugging

 

sodden

 

strips of land!

Waters rising rising, rising.

Thousands slip beneath the rising

Waters, rising, rising, rising!

Floating

Signifiers

In a sea of greed and lies!

In the deadly

jaws of terror.

Children of the Limpopo

Rosita born among the watery branches

In a world

that lets the Pinochets walk free!

Voices Calling 911

And, tho the dying world is calling

Calling, calling 911

We unheeding go on

Blindly, feeding on their misery

Feeling not those others' pain.

Morning Song

We set love free

We set love free today

And

In the evening

Children played in peace, in fields of green

Elian, Elian, Elian Gonzalez

You shall dance and you shall sing again!

Amadou, Amadou Diallo

Your children will grow and dance and sing again.

Children of the Limpopo the image of your drowning

An engram of the blood stained terror of our times.

Peace Princess

Two years to the day

Of her miracle birth

Beneath the whirling blades,

Amid the waving branches,

Above the drowning lands!

Little Rosita

Toddling across the mud plains of the Limpopo

Her little feet tripping across the unmarked graves

Of children swept away in the tides of man made miseries.

Rosita laughs and sings

She reaches out to touch the white winged butterflies,

Her playmates by the sad and lonely river banks.

Little Rosita!

Emblem of a fragile hope!

Princess of peace!

© Auset Communications 2000