(A tribute to the Indigenous children who died in Canadian residential schools)
(Samajweekly) O sweet children under the weeping graves!
These are not just your graves
These are the graves of your mother tongue
Graves of the lullabies that you couldn’t listen
Graves of your mothers’ unsung songs
Your tiny feet dancing in your homes
They are buried in the the same soil
The wings and feathers that you used
To dance like birds
They too are buried here.
By taking you far away from your homes
What lessons were they teaching?
You cried when you saw the big walls devoid of love
Sitting quietly in the classroom
Tears flowing over the faces
Holding heads in your hands
You remember your homes.
The backyards from your naive memory
Were being forgotten daily
In the falling snows
Standing quietly and watching tall trees
You must be remembering your mothers
How could you know where was your home?
And how far away you have come
The home seemed to be hiding behind big trees
Sometimes it seems to be across the clouds
In the shadows of the clouds
The faces of your parents seemed visible
A far away white cloud looked like grandparents.
Who were those teaching you?
Sometimes they seemed like teachers
Sometimes as executioners
Strange words of our so-called civilized people
Pierced yours hearts
Your cries reached your homeland far away
Reaching out to your mothers
Creating nightmares and darkening the sky
When you felt homesick
You may be saying prayers in your mother tongues
Or your lips freeze and eyes become stones.
Your every innocent game we killed!
What you considered a playground
Was actually your graveyard, o children!
We were killing you word by word
The decorated wings on your heads and shoulders
We were plucking out one by one
Who could have tended to the lashes on your body
If not mothers?
Dear children!
To our hazy eyes
You merely looked like objects.
From your silently weeping graves
We have even taken away the stones
There is a grass now and few trees
You have become like grass
You have become like trees
Now the grass and trees
Became the stones of your graves.
From your sleeping graves
The wind blows past
As if you are howling
When it rains
The water pours down
As if you are crying.
On this earth o children!
The graves are everywhere
Some are the graves of mother tongues
Some are of the buried songs
Some are of the cultures crying profusely.
Under our big national flags
Hidden are the graves of children’s ribbons
In our great history books
Hidden are the words stolen from your tongues
Genocide is not just of humans
It is also of language
Of culture and civilization
Of decorated feathers on your heads.
Schools may also be concentration camps
Can be like gas chambers
Any of us at any time
May become a Nazi
Our integrity dies very quickly.
O Children! For you and your parents
The roads became impassable
The news channels died
Homes worn-out while waiting for you
Mothers kept crying while waiting to have dinner with you
Parents have been sitting in your path all their lives
Yet they could not bring you home
Every season they frozen and melted like ice.
O Children! Your innocent graves
Will rise some day
You will wake up slowly
To write down our dark deeds on white snow
The white snow will then melt
And become tears of humanity.
O innocent children sleeping in weeping graves!
Please forgive us
We can’t give you the lullabies
Nor mothers’ love you missed
We can never give you the childhood
Or the folk songs you can sing
Can’t give you the feathers we took from your heads
Nor the first words that your mothers taught.
Those who survived our culture wars
Get up and stone the the collapsing buildings
And the lessons taught in these schools
For all these have been the devil’s work
Throw some stones at us too
For we kept on pushing our language
On the young souls
Detached from their mother tongue
We kept loading our heavy religion
On your innocent heads.
The earth of your graves
Ate all the evil words we taught
And all the immoral prayers we made
Now you are completely divine
You are as pure as the mother earth
You are now meeting your homeland
Meeting your parents.
After killing flower-like children
We have now lay flowers on your graves
Some tiny boots and new clothes
You stayed without them for too long
While snow continued to fall
Rain continued to pour
The leaves kept falling from the trees
The seasons kept changing
You have been forced to live in the dark for too long
We have now lit a few candles for you
How can we apologize to you?
O Children! We’ve now become even worse
We are clearing up forests
Strangling the Mother Earth
We are making a lot of bullets
Building a lot of tanks
Making deadly bombs
To kill more children
And those who aren’t even born yet
The children killed with these weapons
Won’t even find any graves
Earth scorched by the heat of bombs
Will become grave stones for them
And none of us will survive
To tell what else is buried
With these innocent children!
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Amarjit Singh Amneet, Punjab, India
+918872266066
Translated by:
Davinder Singh Garcha, Virginia, USA
