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unbroken
August 11, 2017
they beat us, make us feel worthless,
tell us our life’s cause is fallacy in flight.
again and again, they shatter us,
making us shards, brittle and sharp.
they take us, stealing our friends, our lives,
jumble the fragments together in prisons.
they form cities of broken people,
hoping to crush us under their fists.
but they don't realise shards are weapons,
driven by our unbroken souls.
with our words, we’ll draw together,
fighting as one and utterly whole.
© Gary C., Pequannock, NJ
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Inspired by this quote from Michael Ondaatje's memoir Running in the Family: “When the government rounded up thousands of suspects during the Insurgency of 1971, the Vidyalankara campus of the University of Ceylon was turned into a prison camp. The police weeded out the guilty, trying to break their spirit. When the university opened again the returning students found hundreds of poems written on the walls, ceilings, and in hidden corners of the campus. Quatrains and free verse about the struggle, tortures, the unbroken spirit, love of friends who had died for the cause. The students went around for days transcribing them into their notebooks before they were covered with whitewash and lye.”