The tragedy of inhumanness

Some lives begin slipping long before the body is summoned home,

their spirits wandering in dark corridors,

searching for a light

we never bothered to offer.

We walk past them like they are lepers,

never hearing how their prayers

have grown brittle,

how their hope has started

to loosen its grip on reality,

how they are walking into an abyss of nihility.

We watch officials pass them by,

eyes trained on podiums,

not on people,

on reports,

not on suffering,

on the choreography of authority,

not the trembling of the forgotten.

And when these souls finally rest

in the place of many crosses,

we arrive with borrowed holiness,

murmuring blessings over soil,

pretending we had not watched

their souls unravel while they were still calling out to us.

Leaders, officials arrive draped in ceremonial sorrow,

speaking polished condolences

over lives they never paused to see,

pretending their hands were not part of the slow unmaking,

of those who died while still breathing.

Societies learn too late

that indifference is a kind of violence,

that the tragedy of inhumanness

is not only in the dying,

but in the comfortable distance

kept by those entrusted

to keep us whole.

 

Ora pro nobis.