You can staple/ sew/ bolt my lips together.
I will still cry out to deafen the world outside the bars of my prison.
You can nail my sentences of resistance in a box and ship them to a Gulag, but they will resurrect as skywriting above cities and inflame the people below to rebel.
I will hurl words at your prison guards and torturers.
Smuggle poems out taped under the wings of every passing bird-tucked in the pocket of a breeze.
You can put me before the firing squad.
Introduce me to the hooded hangman but you cannot stop the protest song from scaling the walls of your most secure jail and leaping to place of safety.
Machine gun the verses as they make a dash for the open gate toward the sanctuary of the trees metres away.
But they will still run zig-zagging into the dusk.
If we lose our freedom and the tyrants manacle and torture our bodies we will become unbreakable instruments on which a tune of freedom can be played.
We will not be silenced anymore than you can bottle the raging storm or cork a vast ocean.
If we talk in whispers it will be build up to a hurricane scattering the army and the secret police before it.
Surrender is not an option,condemning us to silence will never happen, the poem and the song will roar louder than the jet plane and our words will dynamite the forces that try and fail to crush us.
Malcolm Paul
Alexi Navalny died in prison February 16th 2024.
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