The Great Ordeal

the marked must go quietly in the night without a word of farewell through the trembled dust down the dark road from which they say no one returns the gods who made Africa strike fear upon the living comfortless vituperative rampaging through our lands: freedom is a hoax we abandon ourselves to the crudely dug dungeon the pit is boiling like a volcano dark blood seething ceaselessly so many souls within its recesses so many mournful eyes so many broken hearts we cannot cry, we cannot move this pit is an endless pursuit of misery there is no escape, there is nowhere to go bit by bit our bodies are dying and our strength disappears we lose our sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch hell lies about us in our innocence we wonder who will be the last, the very last, to seek this place for what it was: they'd neither like nor believe the horrors no God could have allowed we are sure only that from our true liberation movement we have disappeared we simply do not exist no comrade-in-arms squeezes a fake tear for us noticing we are not there when did he last see any of us? he cries out we are disloyal, have betrayed the cause and all the while we are labouring in the dungeons we dig for him we dig to be sure he surely is next on the blacklist the supporters deny our disappearance and with the human rights watcher, no record nobody, it appears, misses us enough to report it is easier to die than to remember and where do we come from? where did the liberation struggle take us, the combat, the underground resistance? prison? protest? mere conviction? it was a time of revolution there were no fantasies there was simply the beyond-endurance and then the fleeing-into-exile we are the illicit cargo marooned in dungeons guarded by scare-crows