The classrooms are deserted.

The playgrounds have turned into

ghost fields where the gunfire

of militia and government troops

echo and re-echo ag

The curse of the great curse is upon us.

The curse of oil is upon us.

The once happy archipelago

is in the midst of a great dying.

The seabirds are gone, the fish are gone.

The river is red with the blood of the slain.

An ancient seagull, woken up from

a thousand years of slumber,

flies over the dying archipelago,

crying to sky, crying to earth,

mourning the death of everything.

This archipelago,

My blood.

My mother

Watered it

With her tears.

When I was born,

I was called Minor,

And treated like

A nobody.

When I howled

Against the infamy,

I was cut down

Like a thing

That this blood-

Stained sea,

My birth water,

May continue to roll

Out to sea

The killing oil barrels.

remember you,

O singing river,

river of my childhood,

haunting river, river of the singing creeks,

where Nature made of me a hunter,

a young fisherman hunting crabs

at the ebb of your mighty tide

I remember you

O sweet childhood friend,

wandering bard that sang to me

of adventures beyond the dancing banks

of the arching sunset, where sweeping tides

meet with the great sea and carry

the brave fisherman to seas

where waves tower over the earth

like Mount Kilimanjaro

I remember you

O playful elf, mating between the roots

of the mangrove trees and murmuring sweet sounds

with the water crabs, mating too and burrowing

deeper into sodden caves, where colonies of crabs

arise like columns of armor-clad Roman soldiers,

march down the banks in serried formation

at the hemline of your laughing skirt

I remember you. I remember you.

I remember you, O fallen friend, blood-stained river,

river drunk with the black crude of death,

river drunk with the vomitus of dying pipes,

river blind from the death touch of smoldering pipes.