We said

    It was a certain arrangement of words that was meant for nothing more than the birthing of storms or revelations of thunder that record every conspiracy rooted in dense, dark forests.

    Why did they insist on war when they heard of elements other than water that flow in rivers, so many elements, elements other than rocks that flow away even as they desire to hold the shadows spreading in valleys because the destiny of sculpting living, breathing statues was denied to them.

    Torture. It was said. The record of every conspiracy of the forest crushed by leaping, galloping thunder birthed from the womb of barren truths.

    Even then there were weapons at the throat of the moon as we promised one another that we will provide each unlit corner of each house with the sun so why did we leave when the blood of the wounded dove was not yet dry on the rocks? Is it because our being, our tribe, our home, our street, our village, our city, our nation is a chain of water perspiring from our bodies and we have been frozen in the intersections for centuries?

    And darkness as darkness that denies oxygen to the lungs.

    — it is the fault of the mirror that bombs every reflection into bits

    — this is what we say to figurative mirrors

    — and to your singers, say, cease your rhythms or we will destroy their drums

    We close our eyes, they go missing.

    We open our eyes, they come present.

    They are held by the play of our eyes closing and opening. But they are scared of words, the arrangement of words, the tenor of the sound of words escaping our mouths, the life of words as they come to the page and walk, breathe, bloom. They found us busy in the play of closing opening closing opening our eyes and ordered:

    Put handcuffs on all the words starting from A to Z and throw them in prison as this will prolong silence and preserve security!

    Thunder leapt and we surveyed with our open eyes dense, dark, conspiratorial forests.

    Listen! Windstorms cannot be wounded with weapons of war. Each word grows a million flowers on its chest. All the clouds of the rainy season cannot give enough rain to irrigate the chests of our words.

    Newspapers, calendars, postcards printed with their pictures, neat and clean, shiny-shiny, washed with detergent.

    When we advanced, leaping thunder clasped in our hands, towards the curtain of smiles covering every conspiracy rooted in dense, dark forests, they cried:

    Guards! Guards! Shoot those words with your bullets!

    But the slaughterhouse is a place where words of affection refuse to die. Thunder and imprisonment?

    Words are the accent of the sun, streams of history, words, as trees that are killed in a land turn their corpses into new roots in the same land.

    The sounds of words boiling in blood swallows cyclones, the rocks of intersections at the mouth of screaming wounds. Then we laughed and welcomed cyclones being birthed.

    When they tried to dig weapons into our laughter, we attacked their hands to take the keys stuck in their bone-like fingers and the leaping flames of our wounds lit our path to the prison where they had chained dawn.

    We were behind, very behind, when we answered the call of cyclones.

    Let the cyclones come.

    Let dawn come.