Light Through a Magnifying Glass

‘Light Through a Magnifying Glass’

What an age this is,

when night

is no longer merely night;

it is a black mouth

swallowing the names of the young

and with its cold teeth

leaving an absence

on mothers’ shoulders.

The girls,

with hair that smelled of fire,

passed through the alley,

and the boys

with shirts that still

believed in the colour of dawn.

But the bullet

was the language of darkness,

and darkness

was hungrier than ever.

They took the eyes,

but the gaze

spread among the people;

in the walls,

in the closed windows,

in hands

raising their children’s photographs

like

lamps.

Yes,

an eye can be blinded,

but seeing

does not begin in the eye;

sometimes

it begins in a wound,

sometimes

in a name shining on stone,

sometimes

in a mother

who weeps quietly,

whose weeping

in a thousand homes

becomes light.

In the heart of night

they fired the final shot,

but night

never

has the last sound.

For every name

that falls to the earth

becomes a root

in the street’s memory;

and every street

one day

with those same roots

will rise.

What do they want

from a human life?

From these wounded bodies,

from these weary breaths,

from these people

who still,

in the darkest hour,

remember the sun?

Does light not

triumph over darkness?

Yes,

but light,

when left alone,

only trembles on a wall;

like a candle

in a nameless room.

Light,

when scattered,

only announces itself,

but when

its rays meet,

it sets the black paper of night

on fire.

That is the secret;

not separate cries,

not solitary wounds,

not resentments

that draw us

away from one another.

Darkness

does not fear our numbers;

it fears our light becoming one.

We

are wandering rays

until

at a single point

we come together.

But if

at the heart of a magnifying glass

we gather,

if hands

around a single sun

join,

if voices

rise beneath an emblem

that sets the sun

upon a lion’s back,

then

light

is no longer a plea;

it is fire.

Some

still do not know

that losing the way

does not always come from the enemy;

sometimes

it comes from little wounds,

from silent grievances,

from staring

at our own shadow,

when

the sun

stands before us.

But freedom

is no one person’s name,

no one group’s road,

no single voice’s inheritance

alone.

Freedom

is the moment

when wounds,

instead of drawing apart,

look at one another

and understand

that all

have passed through the same night.

For that girl

whose eye they took,

but not her gaze;

for that boy

who fell,

but made the people

stand taller;

for the mothers

who still,

in picture frames,

with their children

speak softly;

we must save light

from loneliness.

We must

stand

around a single sun.

And one day

this very soil,

with a quiet voice,

but beyond turning back,

will say:

The night is over,

not because the darkness

had diminished;

because light

was no longer

scattered.