Conscience

You have become our conscience,
That quiet, unsettling voice that refuses to croon
When what is truly called for is scorn;
A glaring spotlight, casting into shadow
The excuses, the alternatives, the diversions.
Grounded in fertile soil, watered from a putrid pool.

The spring once thought refreshing is no more
A freezing slap, cracking our illusions, re-writes once held truths.
Bark stripped from bare trees wail for what was lost,
Yet what they lament was not lost, but forsworn,
A body traded for an easier way without obstacles,
A dream, a promise, that became the coveted.

Truth misunderstood, dangerous in its honour
Stares back at us disappointed and betrayed –
It’s not like you were invisible, not like we could not see
Three hundred and thirty-five bullet holes –
The number takes a lot of letters to write,
An eternity to endure …

…

Now our silence is the witness,
Not the pause or rest of breath in a melody,
But the gaping void of the infinite into which all possibility has been cast,
Where the crotchets and semibreves of millennia are heard as clearly
In the melodies of the generations of the joyous, as acutely
As the cries of the ancestors of the dispossessed.

Surely there are more deserving creations;
Naive of us to think that we are unique,
Ungrateful species that we are,
Destroying because we cannot own.
Hubris exposed from Africa to Europe, Oceania to the Americas.
You are not the sole example of our lust,
Only the most recent.

Infantile excuses turn us away from the efficiency
Of a solution we swore never to permit;
Zip ties for manacles, bulldozers for tanks, eyes for eyes,
All seen, all heard before.
The unconscionable horror of never again
In full view, in stereo, again …
Such a small word, again.
It deserves no more.

© Watershedd, July 2026

BLAK AND BLACK  |  MEDIA AND ADVOCACY  |  EST. 2010