If there are trapdoors in the clouds
Let me climb to freedom.
If I can prise apart the shafts of sunlight
I will slip through into an open field a free
man –
Run rejoicing with every stride.
My poems will be shackled to the walls of every prison.
While darkness prevails until we dip our pen in light and sign away the locked doors and bars.
If we have a voice it’s a megaphone booming out loud.
If we have a choir of resistance it will sing
until the locked doors spring open.
A pill to take away the pain as the electric current tearing our body apart showers our screams with sparks
I know that I can be broken like a human stick snapped across the torturer’s knee.
But a spirit cannot be hosed away like spilt blood in a courtyard.
Or tears swept away and sprinkled with quick lime until they dissolve.
My plea for help will fall and crash against
the floor of the cell.
Until I’m just a speechles bundle more dead than alive.
They can burn us with cigarettes and pour petrol on our manifestos of freedom and joy –
hold a flame to our dreams but we will fly undefeated through the gates to liberty.
.
Malcolm Paul
Picture Nick Victor
.